Id Software has recently unveiled the System Requirements for the upcoming Doom: The Dark Ages and it’s actually more hefty than you may have thought. For starters, the game requires a Ray Tracing capable GPU in order to run even on it’s Minimum visual quality settings which marks Doom: The Dark Ages as the second game since last year’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to mandate an RT capable Graphics Card as part of it’s requirements.
This trend in the recent games does somewhat indicate that we might be nearing the end of Rasterized visuals which was the dominant rendering technology of the pre-Ray Tracing era and only time will tell how it’s going to impact both the games as well as the gamers. While it’s true that Ray Tracing indeed presents a generational leap in terms of visual fidelity, it also makes gaming a bit more expensive cause you need a pretty high-end Graphics Card in order to have a reasonable level of performance with RT-enabled visuals, especially on the latest titles.
Besides the GPU, the CPU requirements for Doom: The Dark Ages is also a bit odd, considering it requires an 8-core CPU to play even at minimum, which makes the game seem like massively multi-threaded in terms of design but we’ll have to wait and see how it all translates to the in-game experience.
Also if you need to upgrade your GPU for Doom: The Dark Ages, I’d personally recommend buying a Graphics Card with at least 12 GB of VRAM as anything less than that is not recommended in 2025, given the surge of exponentially high VRAM usage in many of the games from last year.
Doom: The Dark Ages is set to release on May 15, 2025 for the Playstation 5, Xbox Series X|S and the PC platform. The game also launches day one on the Microsoft’s game pass while the Collector’s Edition Bundle will have up to two days of early access. You can Pre-Order several editions of Doom: The Dark Ages on Steam right now.
