January is usually a muted month for the games industry – but not so this year. CES 2025 was innovative, dynamic and exciting on a number of levels, game releases are actually happening and the excitement for the year ahead is palpable. Microsoft’s Developer_Direct just added to the hype, delivering four very different, very impressive looking games. We discuss all of them in the latest edition of DF Direct Weekly, but I’m going to focus on Doom: The Dark Ages in this particular blog. It looks fantastic!
The latest idTech has been enhanced, updated and revamped for the current generation, while the potential for the PC version is sky high – my colleagues saw the game running with path traced lighting during Nvidia’s CES 2025 editor’s day. Developer_Direct wasn’t hosting the top-end experience with footage that looked much more along the lines of the console feature set – but it still looked spectacular. What we’re seeing here is id Software delivering its first game of the generation that truly taps into the potential of the hardware.
What does that actually mean though? The scale and scope of the Dark Ages is like nothing we’ve seen before from the developer. Levels are larger, traversal is swift, detail is immense. id’s Marty Stratton describes an “enormous increase in overall world detail and player immersion feedback compared to Doom Eternal/idTech7” in very simple terms: “more AI, more geometry, more gore, more destruction.”
- 0:00:00 Introduction
- 0:00:56 News 1: Developer Direct 2025 – Doom: The Dark Ages
- 0:17:36 Ninja Gaiden 4
- 0:22:54 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
- 0:27:55 South of Midnight
- 0:32:38 News 2: RTX 5090 review reaction
- 1:14:39 News 3: Radeon 9070 cards arriving in March
- 1:27:53 News 4: Sony cancels Bluepoint and Bend Studios live service games
- 1:36:27 Supporter Q1: Could the Switch 2 pack unanticipated custom hardware?
- 1:42:18 Supporter Q2: Will GTA 6 cost $100 US?
- 1:48:11 Supporter Q3: Should the PS5 Pro be supported with new games for longer than the PS5?
That’s a pretty good summary of much of the game content seen at Developer_Direct, but there’s more. The new Doom sees id get to grips with the complex problem facing swift traversal over a detail-rich, AI-heavy game world. Stratton tells us that the new idTech features “ultra-fast proprietary continuous sector streaming technology to support the largest levels we’ve ever created and provides almost non-existent level-load times”. And id being id, we’re also expecting this traversal to occur with none of the hitching and stuttering we’ve seen across this generation as developers struggle to cope with channeling so much data through the hardware.
Similar to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Doom: The Dark Ages requires a GPU that supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing. For PC users, that may require a GPU upgrade, but with minimum specification suggesting an RTX 2060 Super for 1080p60 gaming at low settings, id Software looks to have supplied a great deal of scalability here – as you might imagine for a game that needs to run on Xbox Series S. Still, there’s a good reason why RT is needed here. idTech 7’s dynamic interactive lighting uses it, with fully dynamic lighting and shadows. There’s even ray-traced material detection in gameplay – the truth is that RT has many uses beyond rendering.
Returning to the PC settings, id’s recommendations here are intriguing, particularly on the CPU side. For 1080p60 on low settings, a Zen 2 processor like the Ryzen 7 3700X is recommended, alongside an Intel 10700K (which I would say is considerably more capable). However, moving onto recommended and ultra 4K settings, the spec requirement shifts to a Ryzen 7 5700X or an Intel Core i7 12700K. Again, the Intel chip is significantly more performant here, especially when paired with DDR5 memory, but the point is that the ‘windows’ of CPU recommendations here is pretty narrow and higher-end processors outstrip anything seen here, so like Doom Eternal before it, we’re hopeful for plenty of opportunities for high frame-rate gaming on higher refresh rate displays.
Also of interest is the inclusion of path-traced rendering for high-end PCs – but my colleagues only saw a trailer displayed via a projector and they were sitting some way off! However, my view is that this is going to be one of the more challenging implementations for Nvidia users – not so much in actual frame-rate terms, as the new Doom shares similar spec requirements to Indiana Jones, which ran great with path tracing. I’m thinking more about the idea of a fast paced shooter using the technology when denoising is known to have some kind of latency to it. Extreme frame-rates are likely with DLSS multi frame generation, but to what extent is MFG a good fit for this style of content? I guess in a few months, we’ll find out.
There’s a lot more to enjoy in this week’s DF Direct Weekly, not least our comments on the other excellent games that made the Developer_Direct line-up. First of all, there’s the general reaction to last week’s RTX 5090 reviews and the concept of multi frame generation. We have this interesting situation where well-respected commentators like Daniel Owen are providing insightful commentary on the technology but can’t actually show the technology in action.
We had our own attempt with the DLSS 4 preview earlier in the month and we still feel it’s not sufficient. We’ve just posted our DLSS ray reconstruction analysis, with super resolution to follow, but we’re examining different techniques to try to show off multi frame generation effectively before we post anything more about it. It’s a difficult one because right now, I can’t help but feel that as journalists, critics and communicators, we can’t actually demonstrate the technology particularly well – something that will also apply to this week’s RTX 5080 review, which I’m working on now.
We also spent a little time this week talking about AMD’s RDNA 4 graphics cards. It’s understood that retailers have stock, but the release has been pushed back to March. Why? The most obvious reason is that AMD wants to price according to Nvidia’s RTX 70-series cards – which sounds like a decent strategy to me. If it also means that more FSR 4 titles will be available at launch (and for the review period) that can only be a good thing – a good quality upscaling solution is key to getting this launch right. We’ve seen some pretty outlandish claims made for the RX 9070 XT – which, if verified, would represent perhaps the greatest generational leap in GPU performance I can ever remember – but AMD’s own CES slides suggest top-end performance in line with the RX 7900 XT. This seems more plausible, but makes the pricing even more crucial.
So, there’s lots going on in what is the busiest January in tech I can remember. It’s been punishingly hard to keep but I hope you’re enjoying the coverage!
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