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.
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.
Ah man that’s pretty disappointing. I probably won’t buy it until then
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.
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.
New AAA releases that can’t be bothered to optimize worth a damn. If those are something you just can’t do without, then sure, but it’s odd to be all doom and gloom over less than 5% of the games people will play this year lmao(15% of steam playtime in 2024 was new releases, it was a pretty even split between AAA, AA, and indie, and not every AAA game is optimized like ass).
Optimize is not some magical word that can overcome the fact that hardware becomes outdated.
Doom the Dark Ages runs, with ray tracing, extremely well on an RTX 2060 - a card from 2019. That’s extremely optimized, there’s no argument you could attempt to use to criticise how well this game leverages the hardware.
But the developers wanted to use ray tracing - which guess what, does look much better, but also does not run well on the Steam Deck. That’s simply how it is.
What’s the worst AMD card that can run it again? But it’s tooootally just because everybody has to have ray tracing, right? It would just be inconceivable to have, uh… unrealistic light rays? That’s what my game has to have to be playable these days, fucking light rays?
Yes, it stinks that AMD’s ray tracing performance is so far behind. But ray tracing is an unnecessary gimmick, and mandating it is a stupid choice. Imagine mandating your game has to have V-sync, or motion blur, or depth of field, or any of these garbage settings a sizable percentage of the playerbase immediately disables?
Not sure what your rant’s about. Ray tracing is a very significant graphical improvement, it has existed in consumer GPUs for years, the game runs great even on earlier cards. That’s it.
Whether you like ray tracing or not is irrelevant to me, and if AMD convinced customers to buy GPUs with mediocre ray tracing performance for three generations in a row, that’s not my problem either.
Yes, but you deepthroating the technology is now relevant to me, because now it’s limiting my options on what hardware I can use to play the game, unnecessarily.
Can I run Doom 2016 on my mechanical pencil? Of course not, Doom 2016 needs hardware capable of fast rasterization, texture mapping, a lot of floating point arithmetic, and so on, a mechanical pencil can’t do that. Fair enough.
Can I run Doom the Dark Ages on a card that lacks ray tracing hardware? Of course not. Fair enough.
I wasn’t the one developing the game, and I also wasn’t the one forcing you to buy a lesser GPU, so again, not really my issue now is it.
People like you defending this nonsense is exactly the issue, but you’ll never realize it.
Ray tracing can save hundreds of hours of labor time over older methods of lighting, shadowing, that devs would have to do to simulate ray tracing. Or, in many instances, thousands of hours of bake time pre-baking lighting.
So I’m paying thousands of dollars for a GPU to save the AAA company money?
This is a historical trend, new technologies making development easier is exactly why we got 3d accelerated games in the first place. And idk what gpu you’re buying, cause mine wasn’t even $1000 and runs everything great.
Yes, but it’s literally limiting sales and hurting user review scores to save some predictable development hours. And the increase in performance demands means that for most users, the entire game will look worse because everything else is being penalized over a minor lighting improvement.
Doom Eternal looks incredible and runs fantastic on deck, the ID engines have historically been famous for looking great with incredible optimization. This doesn’t live up to that legacy at all. It might have saved them some development time, but it’s literally making it a non-option for a lot of Deck users and people with weaker PCs.
It really is a bummer that idtech of all things is moving away from working on all hardware. I played through Doom Eternal my first time on a 960 at 1080p with 60fps and never a stutter.
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.
I run ray tracing (and path tracing) just fine on a RTX 4060 Ti.
But yes, sure, no handheld at this point in time can handle ray tracing particularly well. The Switch 2 will outperform the Deck in that regard, but likely not enough to matter.
I’m honestly quite interested to see how well the Switch 2 handles CP77.
Also, I edited a bit and added more to my comment likely as or after you made yours.
https://hardwaretimes.com/doom-the-dark-ages-gpu-benchmarks-ray-tracing-vram-usage/
This says a 4060ti can do Dark Ages at about 50fps at 1080p.
Looking at other benchmarks, it … oddly looks like the 8gb vs 16gb version of the 4060ti perform essentially exactly the same
I mean I guess that counts if you’re a 1080p person… I tend to think of 1440p 60fps, everything on ‘ultra’, as a minimum threshold these days for ‘running ray tracing well’, as raytracing becomes exponentially more performance costly as you go above 1080p… which is the whole reason why modern frame upscaling and framegen had to be invented.
A 4060ti cannot run Doom Dark Ages, 1440p at 60 fps. Unless you turn down some other graphics settings… I am not seeing that in any benchmarks.
If 1080p is your benchmark than sure, I guess a 4060ti can almost run at 60 fps.
Also… I am using currently actually existing prices, not MSRP, with actually existing ‘buy now’ stock… as my basis for the previous statement.
There are very, very few 4060tis (16gb) actually available new right now, $600 is the lowest US price I am seeing, though there are a good number on eBay going for around $550, so I guess there’s another technical ‘you got me on that one.’
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.
