The new Doom’s RT system requirements may ignite The Dark Ages for your wallet

Yesterday on Twitter, Nvidia employee Jacob Freeman shared the PC requirements for the upcoming Doom: The Dark Ages, highlighting that the latest id Tech 7 engine would enforce mandatory ray tracing a la the last one, Indiana Jones and The Great Circle.

The first id Tech 7 release, Doom Eternal, was built without an RT requirement but later retrofitted the feature as some RT effects, including reflections. Eternal was otherwise incredibly performant despite its cutting-edge visuals, to the point they even managed a feasible near-locked 30 FPS on the original Nintendo Switch’s anemic Tegra X1 chipset— though, of course, that version had no RT to speak of.

In any case, these minimum requirements will feel quite hefty for many users. While even some non-RT games have been demanding the likes of an RTX 2060 Super for a while now, Doom Eternal could be run on much weaker hardware, and the ray tracing baseline has also amped up CPU requirements to a minimum 10th Gen Core i7/Zen 2 Ryzen 7 tiering. And if you’re still using 8 GB of RAM for AAA gaming in 2025, you might as well go home.

Now, though, it seems id Tech 7 will get pushed to its limits in Doom: The Dark Ages— at least, if you plan to play above 60 FPS. These high-end 60 FPS requirements are much more reasonable than those for Indiana Jones, and it would even seem that full path tracing has been dodged in favor of increased performance while still rendering the entire game on a ray tracing pipeline. Considering how high these entry-level performance demands realistically are for most PC gamers, though, I doubt anyone will take issue with The Dark Ages not threatening our systems and/or egos with path-tracing presets.

That said, one can’t help but notice that all the existing recommended performance tiers for Doom: The Dark Ages only show 60 FPS targets. For true Doom enthusiasts with high refresh rate displays, there’s no question that you’ll want to push a higher framerate to enhance the fluidity of your gameplay further and give you precious reaction time in the frantic gunfights common to modern Doom.

This means those hoping to make the most of their 144-360 Hz displays in this game will need to kick up their CPU and GPU horsepower significantly over Eternal‘s demands and likely still turn down some settings from Ultra. For these purposes, we highly recommend the Ryzen 7 9800X3D or the best gaming CPU you can afford, paired with the RTX 4090, or…yes, the best (RT-enabled, thus Nvidia for this circumstance) gaming GPU you can afford. If all you need is 60 FPS, you can get away with the existing recommended spec…but any PC FPS player knows that 60 FPS is just the beginning.