Doom: The Dark Ages system requirements demand ray tracing gaming GPU

What are the Doom: The Dark Ages system requirements? With perhaps the most famous and revered PC gaming classic returning five years after the superb Doom Eternal, fans of the series might be concerned to learn that Doom: The Dark Ages comes with some surprisingly tough system requirements. If you’re rocking hardware that’s more than six years old, an upgrade might be on the cards.

As befits a stalwart of the PC gaming world, the Doom: The Dark Ages system requirements are detailed, with developer, id, breaking down the specs into minimum, recommended, and ultra/4K listings, plus it notes the user experience you should expect for each of these settings, in terms of resolution and frame rate. Detail is also provided about the overall CPU and GPU specs, as well as specific examples of options that fit those requirements. However, with relatively demanding specs, an upgrade to one of the best graphics card options you can buy now, as well as the best gaming CPU you can afford might be required.

Here are the Doom: The Dark Ages system requirements:

If you’re concerned whether or not your gaming PC has the mettle to take on id’s latest FPS game, you can take our Doom: The Dark Ages system requirements PC benchmark test to answer… Can I run Doom: The Dark Ages?

The Doom: The Dark Ages minimum system requirements are a step above what we’ve come to expect from many new games recently, even as we move into 2025. Crucially, this game stipulates that a ray tracing-capable graphics card is required for all levels of play. Yes, we’re sad to report that a classic performance-oriented FPS like Doom has gone the way of forcing performance-killing ray tracing upon you.

As such, the examples id provides of GPUs you’ll need to run this game, even at minimum settings, are the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 and AMD Radeon RX 6600. Those are both relatively old and modest GPUs anyway but ray tracing performance on both isn’t stellar, and the latest Steam hardware survey still reports the GTX 1060 as being the 12th most popular card on the platform. That’s why id states this is the level of hardware needed to achieve just 60fps at 1080p with low settings in this new Doom game.

As for CPUs, it’s a similar story, with a chip packing at least eight cores being a requirement even for minimum specs. The CPU must also be at least younger than AMD Zen 2 or Intel 10th gen, which means those with CPUs older than six years will struggle to run this title smoothly.

More reasonable is the requirement for 16GB of RAM, as this has moved to being essentially the minimum we’d recommend for a gaming PC anyway. Plus, it’s easy and cheap to upgrade to 16GB of the best gaming RAM these days, with a basic 2x8GB kit available for under $30. You can learn how to install PC RAM via our how to build a gaming PC guide.

Stepping up to the Doom: The Dark Ages recommended system requirements we again see a far higher level of gear than with the vast majority of new games. You’ll get to play at 1440p at 60fps with medium detail settings but some powerful hardware is required to do so.

Just how powerful? Well, the required level of graphics card is one with at least 10GB, with id suggesting the mighty Nvidia RTX 3080 or more modest AMD RX 6800 as options to choose. The RTX 3080 was a $650 card at launch, and of course it’s only a five-year-old card. The fact that a card such as the RTX 3070 isn’t deemed to have enough power to hit the recommended system requirements to play at 1440p is, frankly, shocking.

On the CPU front, the situation is less dramatic, as the requirement is still only for an eight-core CPU, which is what we’d reasonably consider a mid-range CPU option these days – yes, the 9800X3D is the best gaming CPU in the world and has only eight cores while costing over $450, but far cheaper eight-core chips are available. A recommended option is the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X, while for Intel, id suggests the Intel Core i7-12700K.

A move up to 32GB of RAM may seem like another higher-end requirement than you might expect but, again, RAM upgrades are cheap right now so whether you’re running DDR4 or DDR5, an upgrade should be an easy option that will benefit everything you do on your PC.

Finally, we come to the Doom: The Dark Ages Ultra/4K system requirements, and as you might expect, these require some really serious hardware. To hit a 2160p resolution at 60fps with ultra video settings, you’ll be needing a high-end PC that’s under four years old.

Leading the charge for ultra settings is a graphics card with 16GB of VRAM or more, with id suggesting the Nvidia RTX 4080 or AMD RX 7900 XT – both cards that launched just over two years ago for over $900. At least the CPU requirements for these settings aren’t any tougher, as they’re exactly the same as those for the recommended tier. It’s the same story for RAM.

Whatever settings you’re hoping to enable in this game, you’ll need a decent size SSD. The Doom: The Dark Ages download size is  100GB, with id recommending a 512GB drive and that an SSD is required.

The game may still work loading from a hard drive but to give yourself plenty of space and to avoid slow loading times, you should grab one of the best gaming SSD options anyway to boost your storage capacity and loading speed. A good option for this is the WD Black SN850X, which offers great performance at a reasonable cost as a modest PC upgrade.

Without a doubt, these system requirements are slightly alarming news regarding the future of PC gaming. With the likes of Nvidia having been pushing ray tracing so hard in recent years, and Indiana Jones: The Great Circle having just set a new record by being the first PC game to require ray tracing hardware, the fact that a Doom game is pushing the specs this hard too is surprising, to say the least.

However, the reality is that most gamers are now using gear that has some ray-tracing capability. The key question will be just how well or not this game will perform when the May 15 launch does roll around, and whether users with lower-end hardware will find a way to sneak extra performance out of the title.

While we’re a little concerned about the system requirements of the new Doom game, we can’t deny we’re also really excited to see what the game is like. If you are too, check out our Doom: The Dark Ages guide for a full rundown of when the game’s coming out, and what the gameplay’s set to be like, plus you can watch the trailer too. You might also want to check out our best gaming PC guide next, if you’ve ultimately decided your system is in need of a complete upgrade.