welcome to the death of game optimization.
it especially sucks for Doom: The Dark Ages since both Doom 2016 and Eternal were considered very optimized for their times of release.
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2025
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I especially fail to see the value to drive up obsolescence. Look how the Final Fantasy XIV art team, or the Tyranny RPG expressed so much through comparatively ancient engines of the PS3 era. And for shooters we have so much visual polished fidelity, with physics, high resolution textures and dynamic lighting to create anything you want. From "Prey" (2016) to Prey (2005) I think both look amazing.
I especially fail to see the value to drive up obsolescence.
"Can't afford an upgrade to a high-end PC? Buy one of our Xboxes." --Microsoft
Doon 2016 really holds up, it's still one of my favorite games
Not sure why you are so worried. Based on those requirements a Radeon rx 6800 should be able to do Ultra 4K @ 60. The main differentiator seems to be vram.
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My GPU can do ray-tracing and that's usually the first thing I turn off because it absolutely destroys performance for minimal effect. I think ray-tracing is cool and all, but I don't really care when it makes most games run like shit. I thought Elden Ring was poorly optimized until I turned it off and than BAM 120fps no problem.
Honestly if it has to be enabled, as much as I love the Doom games, this'll be a pass for me. Smooth combat doesn't mean shit when it stutters every 2 seconds.
Tbf, elden ring is still poorly optimized. It's been 3 years since it released and I still get cutscene stutters and no ultrawide
I once watched a 20 minute video on how in order to compute trajectories for the rocket launcher in the original doom, they did some of the most advanced math I have seen in any context to avoid doing any division which is computationally expensive. How the mightly have fallen.
Yep the original Doom was something else and the way John Carmack built his engines was something to be in awe of.
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I didn't plan on buying this, but now I extra don't.
Doom eternal was fun up until you had to jump around like a drunken spiderman. Turned that shit off so fast, never buying a doom game again.
The constant required acrobatics turned me off as well. I loved Doom 2016, but Eternal wasn’t nearly as good IMO. I also didn’t care for the low max ammo / punching dudes for ammo or weak spots. Eternal is the first Doom I haven’t finished.
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Yep, the platformy stuff was an big turn off. I got a refund. Wolfenstein games are better.
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id software moving PC specs forward? You're KIDDING. Outrage, I tell you!
Wait, didn't Quake require a math coprocessor enabled CPU?
Hang on, Quake 3 required a 3D accelerator... Outrageous!
Raytracing hardware has been around for the better part of a decade now. It's time.
The same id managed to keep the hardware requirements for Eternal amazingly low. I have a pretty beefy PC, yet I'd prefer to play without Ray Tracing, as that usually keeps the framerate from reaching a stable 120. It sucks they are taking away that option.
Ray tracing really is the future. Instead of doing a bunch of tricks to make things look good all lightning is just simulated using ray tracing.
I remember when metro exodus enhanced edition came out and they explained that when they remade the game for RTX only, they could remove a lot of workarounds like invisible lights. And actually just light the scenes with actual light from bulbs or the sun and it just looked great.
IMO we have to move someday to the newer technology. Whenever that's today or not, I don't know. But it really is the future. Historically it also isn't unusual at all that someone had to get new hardware to play new games. It's just that it was stagnated for a while.
Edit: pretty sure it was this video from digital foundry: https://youtu.be/NbpZCSf4_Yk?t=1376
I disagree. The future is not AAA.
I agree with you. But if AAA develops it so it's easier to implement across the board, im all for it.
Game engines don't have to simulate sound pressure waves bouncing off surfaces to get good audio. They don't have to simulate all the atoms in objects to get good physics. There's no reason to have to simulate photons to get good lighting. This is a way to lower dev costs and increase spending on the consumer side, I would not be surprised if Nvidia was incentivizing publishers to use ray tracing.
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ray tracing is the AI of pc gaming. A bunch of hardware made "obsolete" just so a few nerds can get marginally "better" lighting.
I would say AI is the AI of PC gamimg.
Fake frames and upscaling everywhere.
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I wouldn’t say better lighting, just easier
It's to make development easier.
With ray-tracing it becomes much easier to light environments in game. You don't have to have devs adding artificial light sources or painting environments as of they're lit.
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So couple things:
The first RTX cards were the 20 series, which came out in 2018
There was a time when volumetric lighting was also optional
There was a time when GRAPHICS CARDS were optional.
The first game to require RTX was the Indiana Jones game, as did the Avatar game.
Shit moves on. Did you expect your 1060 card from 2016 to last indefinitely? How long did you expect developers to support 2 different lighting systems?
There is so much to be angry about these days, but not this. This was inevitable. If you MUST be angry about it, at least be angry at the right devs
Shit moves on. Did you expect your 1060 card from 2016 to last indefinitely? How long did you expect developers to support 2 different lighting systems?
This as well as Indiana Jones are both 1st party games Microsoft which are also being released onto Xbox Series S. They are already supporting two different lighting systems because of that.
It's not unreasonable to for paying customers to expect Microsoft to just ship the same performance profiles on their PC games.
What Microsoft is doing is not a technological move. It's a desperate move to sell more Xboxes.
Just pirate and emulate the Xbox version lol
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I grew up gaming on a 386 when the great divide was CGA, EGA, VGA, and SVGA, that was the first big graphics card war for me and the beginning of the whole, Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia moment, and then the gulf of floppy disks and hard drives, and then CD-Roms and then the the 3d accelerators games. PC gaming has always had point of contention between the whales and have nots but gaming studios had a good track record always made sure to provide plenty of support to those gamers who weren't whales.
Forcing ray tracing when you have to have a 1000+ dollar video card to run ray tracing that doesn't tank your frame rate into completely unplayable territory then ray tracing is not ready for prime time yet and complete shit move on the developers part to mandate it when it's still untenable for most gamers.
Nope, this is just complete bullshit to me that's forcing gamers to have a sub par experience and force them into buying more expensive hardware for no other reason than to satisfy a publisher's ego to market their game "next gen".
Edit: How sad is it that ray tracing was first released in 2018 and we still don't have the hardware to run them on a rig with moderate hardware.
forcing gamers to have a sub par experience
The game isn't even out yet and you're commenting on performance! As someone else pointed out, the modern Doom games have a reputation for being extremely well optimised, so let's wait and see how it actually performs on a 20 series card
As for needing a card > $1000 that's just ridiculous. You can get a 4060 NEW for under 500, and again, the minimum here is a 2060.
Re: supporting old hardware, again. The minimum is 7 year old hardware. I was also around in the 386 era and to say that devs of that time supported hardware for longer, is at best, wildly exaggerated.
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Ray tracy can be cheaper for equivalent lighting quality than rasternization. Depending on how they use it, it could be great to have rates and only just like how mega texters work. People got upset about the g p u memory requirements for mega texters , but it was a huge gain in performance if you hit the minimum. Retracing as an effect on top of rasterized ighting is a big hit to performance and the only thing we have now.
Native real-time ray tracing was released like 20 years ago with ati x1000 series. No one wanted to risk making a retracing only games so it never took on. Rtx is based on using ray tracing as an effect to go on top of rasternized graphics.
No current games use retracing only, indiana jones uses it for mandatory effects and not as the primary render method.
I don't care much about RT but the reason they've decided to do RT implementation mandatory is quite good and revolutionary and I can't wait to see it in action. Using RT for pixel perfect hitboxes? Sign me in!
"And now, it has been revealed that the game will use ray tracing (RT) not only to enhance visuals but also to offer key gameplay improvements, such as better hit detection and the ability to distinguish materials in a bid to make the game more immersive."
It won't be for this game that I don't care about, but seeing the recent trend of requiring ray tracing, I will probably have a good reason to build a new computer (you served me well 1070 Ti) !
Or maybe I'll stick to only playing games that work on a Steam Deck. I might not game enough anymore to justify the cost of new hardware. Especially when I look at the current AAA games (which would probably be the ones requiring RT), none of them really make me want to buy them anymore.
sounds like I'll have a great time with this in 10 years when I do my next upgrade.
I think a lot is being made of this headline, honestly. Indiana Jones did the same thing using the same engine... and runs well on a broad variety of hardware, including AMD cards with no dedicated RT accelerators. And that's not an experience designed with high framerate competitive action in mind.
I also literally booted Doom Eternal for the first time in a while today, enabled raytracing, and played at 120FPS with 4K native on a 7900XTX, all settings on High. Id knows how to frigging optimize a title, and you can bet their raytracing implementation will be substantially better optimized than the RT we're used to seeing. So long as you don't run it with Path Tracing (a future forward feature, like Crysis back in the day), I fully expect you'll still be able to get high framerates and incredible visuals.
Wait for the Digital Foundry tests before buying if you're uncertain, absolutely, but I really don't see any reason to be concerned with the way idTech 8 has been shaping up.
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