DOOM: The Dark Ages path tracing upgrade vs standard ray-tracing

NVIDIA has announced that the Path Tracing Patch for DOOM: The Dark Ages will be released on June 18, and once downloaded, DOOM players can make their blood even bloodier.

For those who don't know, path tracing is the best form of ray-traced lighting in games, and is considerably better than standard ray-tracing, but with that bump in graphical quality comes a performance hit.

According to the tech experts at Digital Foundry, who have posted the above video comparing standard ray tracing and path tracing, turning on path tracing on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D with an RTX 5090 at 4K with DLSS set to Performance and the graphics setting set to Ultra Nightmare, turning on path tracing reduces the average in-game FPS by about 39%.

Digital Foundry stresses this is a very good implementation of path tracing, and the performance hit is quite small when compared to other titles, or at least on the higher-end PC hardware. As you can see from the screenshots below, path tracing enables a more vibrant in-game lighting experience as sources of light spill onto the surrounding environment, including the DOOM Slayer, in a much more pronounced way.

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In some instances, such as when the Slayer is standing over a blue light strip on the ground, path tracing enables a blue hue to appear on the bottom of the shotgun, while standard ray tracing does not produce any light at all. For a more in-depth comparison, check out the above video.

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