Want to play Doom The Dark Ages with path tracing? Don't buy an AMD Radeon GPU

The latest AMD Radeon GPUs may have wowed us in most of our game benchmarks, but I've recently been trying them out with the new path tracing mode in Doom The Dark Ages, and found that this is one area where AMD still has a substantial game of Nvidia catch-up to play. Path tracing is a highly demanding form of pure ray tracing that makes gaming graphics look super realistic, and AMD says its latest GPUs can do it, but my test results show that Nvidia has a big upper hand here.

As I found in my recent AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT review, you don't need an Nvidia GPU to run Doom The Dark Ages at decent settings - even at the Ultra Nightmare settings, which includes a lot of ray-traced eye candy, this budget AMD GPU will run the game at 74fps. However, path tracing is a different story. This advanced form of ray tracing isn't supported by many games yet, but it does make a substantial difference to the lighting in a scene, making for a much more realistic image.

The image above shows a scene with path tracing enabled, while the image below shows the same scene without it. Both of them look good, but you can see that path tracing adds a whole new level of realism to the scene, looking less flat, and with the lighting affecting the colors and shadows of objects much more realistically.

Path tracing is extraordinarily demanding, though, and I wanted to see what you need to run it. I firstly wanted to see if this was an area where Nvidia's new RTX 5000-series GPUs offer a decent step up in performance from their predecessors, but I also wanted to see how AMD's new GPUs handled it. After all, ray tracing is an area where, until now, AMD has lagged behind Nvidia.

As you can see in the graph above, path tracing is an absolute GPU killer in this game if you don't enlist any help from DLSS or FSR. Even the mighty Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 only averages 55fps in this game at 1,920 x 1,080. That's a good 11fps in front of the RTX 4080, demonstrating the benefits of Nvidia's latest RT cores, while the RTX 5070 averages 36fps.

Worryingly for AMD, though, both its 9070-series GPUs fail to average 30fps here, despite the 9070 XT being considerably more expensive than the RTX 5070 at current prices. I don't expect the 9070 XT to compete with the RTX 5080, of course, given the huge price difference, but I would expect it to beat the 5070.

With frame rates this low, you really need to enable DLSS or FSR to make the game playable, so I enabled both these technologies on the Quality setting to assess the impact. As you can see in the graph below, the RTX 5080 then averages 90fps, with a 1% low of 74fps, which is solid in action, and gives you some headroom to enable frame gen too (more on that later). Meanwhile, the RTX 5070 just about handles this game at 60fps, but the 9070-series GPUs lag well behind.

To make matters worse for AMD, this game doesn't support its latest upscaling technology, FSR 4, so you can only use an older version of FSR. It looks horrible, with blurriness, distortion, and noise around the edges of objects. As you can see in the image below, playing the game with Nvidia DLSS 4 (which uses the new transformer model), makes for much more detail and sharpness. If Doom The Dark Ages adds support for FSR 4, then that will help AMD here, but at the moment, this is a clear win for Nvidia.

Then we come to frame gen, which I know is a divisive topic among gamers. My own opinion is that frame gen can be a useful tool in the box to give you a smoother frame rate, but that it's only worth enabling if you're already starting from a decent frame rate in the first place. It can't fix a broken frame rate, and in some games, it works much better than others as well.

Maxing out the frame gen on these five GPUs, you can see that the new Nvidia cards accelerate right ahead, and they did feel smooth in action too. I recorded the latency at 35ms on the RTX 5080, which is higher than the 25ms without frame gen, but it was still smoothly playable.

Again, though, the AMD cards really struggled here, as FSR frame gen doesn't work well in this game at all. AMD is working on a form of AI FSR frame gen at the moment, but right now the only option is to use its existing implementation, which results in frame rates jumping all over the place in Doom The Dark Ages. As you can see, the 1% lows are still under 50fps on both GPUs as a result.

Move up to 1440p, and Doom The Dark Ages will well and truly punish your GPU if you enable path tracing. Not one of the five GPUs I tested could achieve a decent frame rate without DLSS or FSR enabled, as you can see in the graph above.

Again, however, the Nvidia GPUs cope with this workload better than the AMD GPUs, and the game is playable on the RTX 5080 if you enable DLSS on the Quality setting - it will be even better if you drop to the Balanced setting, which still looks decent with the new DLSS transformer model. I haven't included the frame gen results for this resolution, as only two of the GPUs had a decent enough starting point to enable it, but you can see how much AMD's GPUs struggle with this workload at the moment.

Don't worry if you own an AMD GPU and want to play Doom The Dark Ages - it still looks fantastic without path tracing, and it runs smoothly on the new GPUs at Ultra Nightmare settings. However, Nvidia has chalked up a very clear win here, showing that AMD still has an area where it needs to catch up, as well as the need to get FSR 4 into new games.

That said, there are also many instances where our AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT review showed that this GPU is much more powerful than the RTX 5070, and it also has 16GB of VRAM, which is becoming more important in the latest games. If you're looking for a GPU upgrade, take a look at our guide to the best graphics card, where we take you through all our favorite options at a range of prices.

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