Submitted 22 hours ago by Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz to steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
https://steamdeckhq.com/news/how-doom-the-dark-ages-runs-on-the-steam-deck/
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.
It ships with Denuvo malware, so I just assumed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Rolive@discuss.tchncs.de 6 hours ago
I’d be pleasantly surprised if it even runs at all.
overload@sopuli.xyz 4 hours ago
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.