Doom The Dark Ages system requirements revealed, Nvidia’s RTX 5060 might only meet minimum spec
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Doom, one of the most recognizable gaming franchises ever, gets a new entry to the series this year. Doom: The Dark Ages has been announced for May 15th, and you can already pre-order it. Another important reveal comes alongside the release date announcement: the PC system requirements.
Right off the bat, we can see that The Dark Ages will be a lot harder to run than your average Doom game. People love to refer to the original Doom running on absolutely anything (including this Raspberry Pi mini PC and even in a PDF file). That’s hardly a fair comparison, but even its most recent mainline entry – Doom Eternal – runs incredibly well on low-end hardware, so it may come as a surprise to see The Dark Ages require ray tracing.
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Doom The Dark Ages system requirements
This isn’t the first time ray tracing support is required as a minimum, the launch of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle late last year had the same requirement – meaning your old Nvidia GTX GPU isn’t good enough for it. And it won’t be for Doom: The Dark Ages either; both games run on the id Tech engine.
As we can see from the official system requirements posted recently, a “raytracing-capable GPU with 8GB dedicated VRAM or better” is required, even for playing at 1080p low settings, targeting 60 FPS. The RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti are two cards that Nvidia has yet to reveal for the 50 series, but they are rumored to require 8GB and 16GB VRAM respectively. That means the 5060 may only get by on 1080p, considering the recommended 1440p 60FPS specs ask for at least 10GB.
Nvidia’s rivals have been ensuring their GPUs come with enough VRAM for modern games, with Intel’s new Battlemage cards offering 12GB and 10GB for the sub-$300 price bracket. On the bright side, Doom: The Dark Ages is one of the titles getting DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation support at launch, which the 50 series will take full advantage of; MFG is exclusive to the series.
We often use Doom Eternal as a benchmark title thanks to its excellent optimization and easy-to-run nature. For example, the budget-friendly Intel Arc B580 averaged 225 FPS on the ‘Ultra Nightmare’ settings preset at 1080p and even enjoyed 161 FPS with ray tracing at the same resolution. Move up to 4K, and the card could even push an average of 90 FPS (without RT). However, looking at The Dark Ages requirements, only “Nvidia or AMD hardware” is mentioned, so we’re curious to see how it holds up on an Intel Arc GPU.