GAMES / REVIEWS
Doom Eternal / Graphics analysis
T
he Doom series has always fought at the
cutting edge of visual fidelity, and Eternal is no
different. Not only is it one of the best-looking
games ever made, but also one of the best-performing.
Alongside visual fortitude, optimisation and flexibility
were clearly also high priorities for id Software here
Eternal has an extensive array of graphics settings,
with not three but six base quality modes – Low, Medium,
High, Ultra, Nightmare and Ultra Nightmare. Further, there
are 13 individual settings that can each be tweaked in
those six modes. These include general quality settings
such as adjusting the quality of the lights and shadows,
and altering the texture-pool size, which has a significant
impact on the amount of VRAM used.
More specific options include particle and decal quality,
as well as the ability to adjust the intensity of volumetric
lighting. Beyond textures, two of the more significant
impactors on performance are water quality and
geometric quality. The former affects both the way water
is lit and simulated, while the latter adjusts the amount of
detail with which geometry is rendered.
Impressively, the difference between playing the
game on its lowest and highest settings is relatively
small. When it comes to scenery, higher settings enable
slightly sharper textures, and more complexity to the
way surfaces are lit. The Super Shotgun, for example,
has more light-sheen on Ultra Nightmare than on Low.
Character models also sport more detail on higher
settings. The giant demon being impaled by the Sentinel
mech looks considerably more jagged on lower settings
compared with high settings.
Still, the amount of detail evident on the lowest
settings is a powerful demonstration of how id has bakedvisual fidelity into the core experience, with several key
changes to the engine pipeline during the development
of id-Tech 7. Most notably, id has ditched John Carmack’s
megatextures technology in favour of high-performance
image streaming. Combined with a new occlusion culling
system that mercilessly cuts off-screen geometry from
the pipeline, Eternal is capable of rendering 80 to 90
million polygons in a single frame. Id-tech 7 also uses the
Vulkan API for its rendering and engine tools, enabling
faster iteration of in-game objects at a development level.
As well as being visually stunning as a basic standard,
Eternal also performs brilliantly. Running on a Ryzen
5 3600 and an Nvidia GTX 2080 Super, Eternal can
consistently maintain 50-70fps at 4K on Ultra Nightmare
settings, making it one of the best games to play at 4K.
Running at 1080p on the same settings, frame rates
can easily run into the 100s on an RTX 2080 Super.
Indeed, Eternal is one of the few games that can take full
advantage of monitors with ultra-high refresh rates. It also
makes good use of multiple CPU cores, with each of our
test CPU’s threads being pushed while running the game.
The only black mark against Eternal from a technology
standpoint is the lack of support for real-time ray tracing.
It’s understandable why id decided against adding it – RTX
is extremely performance-intensive and Eternal requires
a smooth experience for its hyper-reactive combat to
work. Nonetheless, it would have been neat to see how its
environments look with real-time lighting and reflections.
Still, Eternal has clearly been designed with the PC as
a top priority. It’s incredibly detailed, intensely scalable,
and one of the best-performing new games we’ve
encountered in some time.
RICK LANEThe game still looks
good at Low, but
upping the settings
adds more detail and
sheen to the demon’s
shoulder armour,
and the water looks
better too
Low High Ultra Nightmare