Doom: The Dark Ages NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Performance

Written by John Yan on 5/19/2025 for PC  

Doom: The Dark Ages is finally out and you can read Rob’s review of the game on the PlayStation 5 to see how much he enjoyed it. It’s a fun and violent romp through Argent D'Nur and for those wanting a highly enjoyable old-fashioned first-person shooter, this is the game for you.

NVIDIA was kind enough to send along a PC copy of the game and I’m going to take it through some benchmarks using an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, Team Green’s flagship GPU.

Doom: The Dark Ages is powered by id Tech 8, the first game to use the latest from id Software. Like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which uses id Tech 7, Doom: The Dark Ages now requires a card that has ray tracing support as that’s one of the core technologies used in the game to generate lighting and reflections. Make no mistake about it, the game looks beautiful with ray tracing producing realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections.

While not at launch, there will be an update to support path tracing to make the lighting even more stunning and realistic. Once that comes out, we’ll revisit the performance when turning it on, but for today we’re going to look at DLSS and Multi Frame Generation as well as a small comparison between running the game in ultra settings versus medium settings.

Here’s the test bench used to test the game:
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo RGB 64GB (2 x 32GB) DDR5-6000 PC5-48000 CL30
ASRock B65-E PG Riptide WiFi motherboard
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090
Samsung 990 Pro 4TB SSD
LG OLED42C2PUA 42"
NVIDIA Drivers 576.40

First up, let’s see the game runs between the base line, Quality DLSS, and Balanced DLSS.

Unlike Doom Eternal, which ran really well on most cards and is highly optimized, Doom: The Dark Ages’ requirements entail a beefier card. Here running at 4K, we’re averaging 84.95 frames per second with a 1% low average of 73.44 fps. It’s not an apples to apples comparison considering Eternal runs on id Tech 7 and was done five years ago, but that game would run in the mid to upper 200 fps with the same setup. That’s not to say Doom: The Dark Ages runs bad on the RTX 5090 since there are many changes to the engine and the ray tracing requirement. But if you want to know how the two compare, there you go.

Engaging DLSS features offers a nice bump in performance with a 38.6% increase when using Quality DLSS with an average of 117.7 fps and a 1% low average of 100.18, while going to Balanced DLSS showed an uplift of 51.4% with an average of 128.63 FPS and a 104.89 1% low average, which isn’t much more than Quality DLSS in that area. I thought the picture quality going to Quality and Balanced were solid, and I’d definitely recommend going to Quality DLSS if you want to take advantage of a 120Hz monitor.

But those with even higher refresh rate monitors might want to turn on frame generation. Here’s how it runs when using either 2X or 4X multi frame generation along with DLSS.

You definitely want a good baseline performance before enabling multi frame generation and here you can see how smoothly the game runs. I’m not as big of a fan of 4X than 2X solely as a preference of wanting more real frames then generated frames as a personal preference. At both Quality and Balanced settings, you’re going to get a pretty substantial boost in fps average with it enabled.

Average latency would not record with NVIDIA’s Frameview software used to benchmark the game, so I can’t say how much latency is added on top of the game’s mid to low 40s millisecond latency without turning it on. I thought it felt fine when playing with it where I didn’t really notice a huge spike in lag. This is something that’s going to be different for a wide range of people as some notice latency more than others. That said, I’d play around with the frame generation aspect if you already have a good base and the RTX 5090 does on 4K with Ultra Nightmare settings enabled.

Finally, I wanted to see the difference between Ultra Nightmare settings and Medium settings in the game. After playing it on both for some time, it’s hard to tell any difference between the two in terms of image quality. As such a fast paced game, it might be beneficial to just run at a lower setting to get as much performance out of it as possible without sacrificing image quality. Here are the two baseline scores compared to each other.

At about a 7.3% uplift when switching to the Medium setting, you’re getting a little bit of performance which, at this level, might not matter as much. For those that want every little bit of fps gain, I’d say definitely do the Medium preset. It doesn’t seem like you’re losing much.

Going with DLSS also doesn’t net you much in terms of performance uplift from Ultra Nightmare to Medium as well. I’m not surprised, as without any of the NVIDIA features turned on, the performance increase is negligible. Maybe future updates will see a wider range of differences, but for now, if you can run it on Ultra Nightmare well—and you can with the RTX 5090—I’d just stick with that.

Doom: The Dark Ages is a highly fun first-person shooter that harkens back to the days of fast-paced, run-and-gun shooters with some great blocking and melee aspects added on top. With an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, you’re getting top notch performance and image quality to go along with it and it’s a great card to use with id Software’s latest game.