Doom: The Dark Ages Revelations: GPU Benchmarks with and without Path Tracing
In this article
What is the best graphics card for Doom: The Dark Ages - Revelations? We answer this question by analyzing 33 gaming graphics cards. The same principle applies here as with all PCGH benchmarks: If a graphics card performs well or even flawlessly in these tests, there's nothing to worry about in the rest of the game—and that's good to know.
As usual, the measurements are taken using CapFrameX; we calculate our results based on the average of three runs. Of course, the graphics drivers are the latest versions available at the time of testing. To help you better understand the results, we also provide the average clock speeds recorded during the measurements and show the benchmark scene in the video. If you'd like to replicate our benchmarks on your own computer, you're more than welcome to do so.
GPU Benchmarks at Native Resolution
In Doom: The Dark Ages, ray tracing is a fundamental part of the lighting, which is why a ray-tracing-capable graphics card is a minimum requirement. For Nvidia, this starts with the RTX 2000 series; for AMD, with the Radeon RX 6000 series; and Intel's Arc series also supports ray tracing. GPUs that rely solely on rasterization, such as the Geforce GTX 1080 (Ti) or Radeon RX 5700 (XT), cannot run the game.
Doom: The Dark Ages is part of our GPU benchmark suite; we test the game with both ray tracing and path tracing, which is why we always have up-to-date data available. To mark the release of the Revelations DLC, we're presenting the results for 33 graphics cards from 2018 through 2026 across four resolutions and two difficulty levels: with and without path tracing. Let's start with the frequently requested benchmarks at native resolution. All graphics cards run the benchmark with the default ray tracing and the game's own temporal anti-aliasing set to 100 percent, ensuring that computational load and image quality are consistent. Let's see what the results show:
At the launch of Doom: The Dark Ages, Blackwell graphics cards (RTX 5000) were still underperforming. Among other things, this led to the Geforce RTX 5080 underperforming compared to the RTX 4080 Super—a result that's technically difficult to explain. The issue has since been resolved, and the ranking of Nvidia graphics cards has been consistent ever since. The impressive Radeon performance is as remarkable now as it was then; despite ray tracing, RX 7000 and even RX 6000 graphics cards glide through the hordes of monsters with buttery-smooth frame rates.
The results also show a significantly higher demand compared to Doom Eternal—feel free to compare these older figures with the ones above —though this makes sense given the much more dynamic and expansive levels. While the fastest graphics cards achieve triple-digit frame rates, this goal is already ambitious beyond Full HD/1080p. If you'd like, you can boost the frame rate at any time by enabling upscaling (DLSS, FSR, XeSS).
GPU Benchmarks with Path Tracing
Since June 2025, Doom: The Dark Ages has been part of the illustrious circle of path-tracing games. If it pleases you, you can enable this high-end lighting technique—but be warned: the performance cost is extremely high! For the following benchmark, we've enabled "full ray tracing" and turned on upscaling as well. Each GPU can rely on its own proprietary method, though in every case, it operates at 67 percent of the internal resolution. As a result, the image quality of the graphics cards in the following benchmark is no longer identical, but at least comparable. Here are the results:
*Radeon: FSR Quality, Geforce RTX: DLSS Quality, Arc: XeSS Ultra Quality
Path tracing is Geforce territory; RTX 5000 graphics cards really shine here. If you want to experience path tracing with as few compromises as possible, you'll need a recent Nvidia graphics card like the Geforce RTX 5070 Ti. The numbers clearly show that path tracing also puts memory capacity to the test; 8 GiByte of VRAM just won't cut it here—we recommend 16 GiByte. Alternatively, lowering the texture streaming budget from the maximum of 4,096 MiB to, say, 2,048 MiB can help, though this leads to pop-ins on surfaces. You can read more about this evergreen topic in our VRAM guide: Geforce and VRAM Guide: Radeon.
