Hey PCWorld fans, Keith here and today we’re going to jump right in with the Doom slayer
in DOOM Eternal which just got it’s next-generation upgrade featuring Ray Traced effects along
with NVIDIA’s DLSS to give those RTX cards a significant boost, so sit back and relax
while we go through the visual impact of Ray Traced reflections, DLSS settings, and of
course, performance in DOOM Eternal. Now we’ve all been ripping and tearing through DOOM Eternal for well
over a year at this point, and it could have been longer had it not been delayed BUT that’s
a whole different story. Today we’re talking about the much anticipated, debated, and quite delayed
next generation DOOM Eternal experience featuring Ray Traced reflections along with DLSS injections.
Things were a bit of hush hush ahead of this with not a peep until Computex 2021 where
we got to see the first real trailer for it. Now that the update has hit and we’ve been
able to get our hands on it now knowing that the Ray Tracing features have been limited
to Ray Traced Reflections, but that’s not to say it isn’t insanely impactful in the
game itself. And no, this isn’t an update to make everything shiny and chrome as often you see
claims of online. What we see happen here in DOOM Eternal is that every surface and
texture is assigned a roughness level that dictates just how reflective, or not, that
surface is. Concrete? Don’t expected reflections unless there’s pools of water or blood on
it, you get the idea. Windows and glass are given depth and clarity where before they
received large screen space reflective tendencies resulting often in glass you simply couldn’t
see through. I was almost convinced at one point that the title is using emissive lighting
but it’s just the amplified reflections on smoother more reflective surfaces that
just work better for reflecting said light. I want to take our first venture in looking
at the game in the Doom Slayer’s Office in his fortress of doom. This room actually
makes showcasing the changes that occur with RT Reflections quite stark, with it all off
everything just looks how we’re used to seeing it with the windows transparent with
a bit of screen space details reflected in there and on the left there’s a small box
that without RT enabled has no data to work with so there’s no reflections, but enable
RT and now there’s some off-screen details that can be resolved into the object. Moving
onto the scorched earth we can see that not all scenes are massively impacted by the introduction
of RT Reflections in this title sometimes the effect is subtle and turns into a nice
ah ha moment like in this scene where things seem to not make a big impact until you see
yourself reflected in the broken window, this just doesn’t happen with traditional screen
space reflections in this title. But lets see things in motion, after all that’s how
DOOM Eternal is best enjoyed, you’re not going to do much standing about so to keep
things consistent I used the opening sequence on the Mars Core level and here we can see
massive changes to the way the game is presented, but at the same time it’s not distracting,
rather it adds to the scene with the floors reflecting correctly based on the smoothness
of the surface, objects around the facility reflecting as well. One of the nice little
touches is the room reflecting on the monitors, it’s a bit harder to see but it’s there.
Towards the end of the scene we get to see the reflections in the elevator are more accurate
where the RT off scene uses unnecessary SSR while the RT Reflection scene maintains a
clear bottom, but you also get a nice hint at the reflective nature of the weapons. Now
on to DLSS. NVIDIAs Deep Learning Super Sampling technology has come quite a way since its
introduction and with DOOM Eternals update, we see its return. In Doom Eternal you’ll
find three available options for settings, missing the now typical Ultra Performance
option and only having Quality, Balanced, and Performance. For this example, we went
back and used the same scene that we just looked at this time we’re looking at the
DLSS impact from various states in motion with the left of the screen staying native
and moving down the stack on the right starting with Quality DLSS settings which are quite
nice from all accounts that I can find and in the showing I have no qualms with recommending
turning this option on, even if you choose not to engage the RT reflections just to push
the frame rate even higher. Moving things to the Balanced setting starts to allow for
pixel peeping toms to start finding differences in the images but at 4K the DLSS algorithm
has enough data to work with to resolve a convincing image. Move things down to Performance
and this will be where you can start spotting the differences in slower moving scenes like
this, but move into actual gameplay and you’re going to find yourself hard pressed to notice
a difference, but I still personally recommend Quality as the option to play with. What about
Performance? All the bells and whistles surely come at a cost, right? Well, you can bet they
do and it can be quite heavy at times, thankfully the IDTech 7 engine is already a super-fast
and super capable game engine, but it can be extremely memory intensive which is something
to really take into consideration when attempting to run this game full out. If you’re trying
to run this game at 1440p or greater, maxed out on Ultra Nightmare with a card having
an 8GB or lower memory buffer you’re going to want to adjust the texture pool size to
fit these cards. We HAD to do this in order to test the RTX 3070 with everything enabled
at 1440p and admittedly I couldn’t tell a difference in image quality because of it,
but after we look at the results, I’ll touch on those to show you what happens when you
let the texture pool swell past the VRAM buffer. Performance at 1440p with the latest of both
parties shows a very even results across the board, both the GeForce RTX 30 Series cards
in use here are showcasing very similar performance as the Radeon RX 6000 Series cards, but things
change a bit when RT Reflections are enabled with the RTX 30 Series taking around a 30%
hit while the RX 6000 Series taking closer to a 50% hit. Of course the RTX cards benefit
from the inclusion of DLSS and we see a large portion of the performance regained by running
at the Quality preset. At 4K we found the lower tier cards better suited to stay in
the 1440p category so the RTX 3080 and RX 6800 XT head off here with expected performance
gaps in traditional rasterized portions of the game with the RTX 3080 holding a 46% performance
lead fore you even factor in DLSS Quality which pushes it upwards of 80%, but that’s
not to say the RX 6800 XT is a slouch and you can certainly enjoy Doom Eternal maxed
out at 4K with high frames and that’s a testament to Idtech 7 for sure. Now, what
about what happens when you leave the texture pool alone and running an 8GB or less card,
well it’s not pretty. If you were to leave that setting alone on the RTX 3070 you’ll
find yourself running down from 200 FPS to under 30, move it to just Nightmare and you’ll
triple your performance to 89 FPS, and double it again by moving to Ultra, and I’d challenge
you to see if you can spot the difference in image quality when doing so. Admittedly
this only creates a positive impact if your card is short on VRAM for the Ultra Nightmare
settings. So, there you have it folks, that’s the around about of the DOOM Eternal Next
Gen update and how ray tracing reflections add to the games already gorgeous, yet unnerving
scenery, how DLSS can help NVIDIA RTX users claw back some of the lost performance, an
idea of how the game performs with these new features even if you’re running a Radeon
RX 6000 Series graphics card, not to mention how to handle things if you’re getting pounded
by VRAM requirements and are sitting on 8GB of VRAM or less at 1440p and still have an
otherwise more than capable graphics card. Well folks that’s it for this video let
me and the other viewers know how your experience has gone with DOOM Eternal and it’s latest
update, are you still playing or are you planning on getting back in on the action. Leave a
like if you found this entertaining or enjoyable and be sure to subscribe here at PCWorld for
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