Ray Tracing by Doom Eternal provides a radical improvement • Eurogamer.pt

The idTech 7 engine has evolved with the arrival of a new patch for Doom Eternal, adding ray tracing support for well-equipped PCs – and of course PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, which also receive 120Hz resolution and refreshes. But the RT implementation is the big star of the show, adding beautiful reflections on surfaces like water, glass, metal, plastic and even polished wood. The computer also benefits from Nvidia DLSS support, which means that even entry-level RT graphics cards like the RTX 2060 can deliver a great experience with next-generation features turned on.

So what’s the real motivation for incorporating RT reflections into a game like Doom Eternal? In preset settings, they combine with standard screen space reflections to form a “complete package” for a result that can have a transformative effect in a game with the kind of materials Doom Eternal uses – metals and shiny plastics – although coarse materials can benefit from the effect. Reflections accurately reflect types of surfaces and are more dynamic, to the point that surrounding and moving environments are drawn seamlessly onto appropriate surfaces – something standard cube maps can’t do.

I was also interested to see if particles were also present in the reflections – so shooting an explosion with a BFG in the distance, then rotating 180 degrees to look into a glass window, would see the effect repeat itself in the reflection, along with other elements of scene dynamics. Of course, the Doom Slayer itself is also in the reflections – even if they are rough. Doom Eternal uses the “floating hands” style of the real first person model, but the point is that with virtual reactions, the player isn’t there at all. Based on RT, based on the translation of light rays, all distortions in the material are precisely mapped – perfect mirror reflections occur only if the material itself is perfectly flat. Ray tracing also applies to every pixel, so even small glass objects like health flasks will show full RT reflections with original detail, if we look at them closely.

While we’ve talked about how Doom Eternal uses pure ray tracing, it’s important to mention that screen space reflections have been added “on top of” the ray tracing variant. This can have upsides like adding fog to reflections, but it can also lead to some inaccuracies around the pure RT approach (which is also available through options), but it increases performance. By the way, on the RTX 3080 at ultra-nightmarish settings, RT reflections reduce performance by 38 percent. This seems like a huge shortfall but the point is that Doom Eternal actually runs really fast – the worst case RT I could find is a 3.5ms render time, which is actually pretty fast. Not only that, quality can be reduced and performance improved – before we even think about a DLSS accelerator.

Looking at the reflection quality setting, I didn’t see any difference between Nightmare Ultra, Nightmare and Ultra – all three of these settings have the same cut-off in thickness and half-res reflections. Decreasing the thickness reduces the quality of the reflection, which means that fewer surfaces have RT reflections – and the resolution of these reflections decreases as you lower the settings. As you’d expect with its power, the PC is capable of producing much better RT quality than consoles running at 1800p resolution with the equivalent average PC reflection quality. This means less roughness cut and RT reflections with one-third accuracy. Beyond that, however, consoles go to Ultra PC quality settings in terms of visual quality, although the anisotropic filtering is pretty low by PC standards, while shadows of screen space seem to be absent.

All of this leads us to the inclusion of Nvidia’s DLSS, which again has the ability to match and even exceed the native resolution display in many respects – especially if the .dll file included in the game has been swapped out for the version shipped with Rainbow Six Siege (checks). Our content is here To see how much better this variant of DLSS 2.2 is over the already great 2.1). In fact, the RTX 2060 that uses DLSS benchmark for performance quality up to 1800p by 900p internally looks much better than either console version and does not degrade image with dynamic resolution scaling the way the PS5 and Series X do when overloaded (although Make sure this game supports DRS with DLSS if you like). The performance improvements are impressive – but keep in mind that the quality of RT’s reflection depends on the internal resolution of DLSS, so it can be degraded. Increase the setting there, or go to the command line and increase it further if you can – I’ll discuss how to do that later.