[Game] Doom the Dark Ages will not run well on steam deck at release
[Game] Doom the Dark Ages will not run well on steam deck at release
With SteamOS getting a quick new update, we decided to check out DOOM: The Dark Ages on the Steam Deck and see just how well it is running.
The TL;DR: The game won't launch on current steamOS, but preview build 3.7.6 fixes the launch issue.
Unfortunately the game is unable to maintain decent frame rates even with severe reductions in graphical settings.
The drastic decrease in performance compared to Doom 2016/Doom Eternal is due to the game using mandatory ray tracing for lighting.
It's possible that we'll see some patches or mods that improve performance, but at launch it will not be a good deck experience.
EDIT: Not sure why Lemmy is embedding that youtube video, there's an actual article about the performance, and there's a different video on how the Steam Deck itself actually performs with the game.
That’s so disappointing to hear. DOOM and DOOM Eternal not only run fucking fantastically on the Steam Deck, but they look fucking gorgeous on it too.
I had my suspicions that Microsoft would fuck something up and now my suspicions say that this is it (and I hope this is the extent of it)
I'd be pleasantly surprised if it even runs at all. Mandatory ray tracing is stupid though.
It's bullshit. iD's engine is well optimised but this is a requirement that screws people who don't otherwise need to upgrade their GPU.
It ships with Denuvo malware, so I just assumed.
This is disappointing. DOOM 2016 runs like a dream on SD and it's my go-to when showing it off and handing it to someone. Devs need to spend less time on ridiculous visuals and more on gameplay and performance. Fortunately I had no intention of buying the game anyway because Denuvo.
I do 99.9% of my gaming on the Steam Deck... But it's also important to recognize when it's time to let go.
It was released using AMD hardware in the middle of a transition to ray tracing and path tracing replacing rasterized effects. It's great hardware, but we need to accept that new releases will probably not be compatible with this system.
They already have a patch to fix it in beta. And I refuse to accept that. AAA companies need to learn to optimize their games if they want people to buy them. It's gotten so bad that a lot of new games run like shit on the PS5.
To be clear, the steam deck supports some ray tracing and it's enough to run the game, but the performance impact is too much to run at 30fps.
The more powerful ROG Ally also isn't able to hold a consistent 30fps either (despite using a way higher tdp on it's chip), so this isn't a Deck exclusive issue.
The only stuff that can run ray tracing well (60fps or better, well) are currently GPUs that cost ... $600 if you're lucky, more like starting at $825 or $850, going up to $2000+.
This is independent of AMD or Nvidia, at this point. Yes, you can get better RT out of an Nvidia card, but you'll be paying significantly more.
What you mean to say is: Games with forced RT instead of actual graphics options force you into the Nvidia monopoly.
...
Handhelds can't handle RT.
Like just none, barring adding on an eGPU.
Switch 2 could be an exception, but I doubt it'll be able to do more than 30fps with RT on, with say, Cyberpunk 2077.
The only reason consoles can handle RT at all is because they use checkerboard rendering, which is basically sort of a mix between using interpolated frames and also upscaling.
480p fully renders each frame, 480i only updates half the pixels on the screen each frame, usually with alternating scanlines.
Checkerboard rendering is more or less another way of doing that, but in a checkerboard pattern, that also upscales by a factor of two... so when a console says its outputting at 4k, thats true, but it isn't rendering at 4k.
...
The steam deck overlay does have a half rate shader rendering option, I have found this helpful in certain games/emulators... though sometimes it makes too much of the game look like too much ass, when it is either heavily reliant on shaders and/or they are wildly unoptimized.
It is theoretically possible that this option could help at least somewhat... the author mentions trying deckyframegen on a game that just came out, apparently having no idea that decky framegen needs time to... you know, incorperate some other mod that figures out how to hack FSR into the game, or do it themselves.
Either that, or go into the game's config files and see if there is some value or toggle that can be flipped to just actually turn RT off... which I guess at this point just is what people would and have called a 'graphics mod' for many other games where something like this is done.
...
Nvidia and Unreal heavily pushing RT is a market strategy to ensure the monopoly power of Nvidia, and the further usage of UE5.
...
EDIT: Looks like idTech 8 doesn't normally/fully support Vulkan on Linux.
If they wanted to make a release that works without RT, they could, they'd just have to rip out all the RT stuff and make a version compatible with Vulkan-base, and that looks like it would run well on AMD GPUs / a Deck, but that apparently was not a launch priority for them.
Which is kind of weird, because idTech7 was... only Vulkan, on PC... and did support RayTracing, and Doom Eternal, with RayTracing, did run decently well on high end AMD GPUs of the time (6800, 6900, etc), despite having less and less advanced RT cores than the Nvidia 3000 series.
Didn't they manage to get Indiana Jones working after a while? That's on the same engine, right? I'll be patient. Don't have the energy for Doom at the moment anyways.
I honestly had no issue with Indiana Jones at launch on the Deck. My tolerance for performance issues is probably higher than average, granted, but I started playing it within a few days of launch on the Deck and beat the main story within a few weeks of that. It was officially unsupported and there were absolutely some framerate hiccups, but it was totally playable and enjoyable. It actually ran better on the Deck than my desktop (also Linux, to be fair) for a while because of nvidia driver issues. The faster pace of Doom will make it more of a problem, though.
Ah man that's pretty disappointing. I probably won't buy it until then