DOOM PC Performance Review

Conclusion

DOOM 2016 campaign is undeniably a return to form for the series, bringing back the classic FPS experience with some amazing visuals and satisfying fast-paced gameplay. For the most part, the PC performance of this game is good, but right now performance is going to be a mixed bag for AMD users.  

When playing DOOM on AMD hardware you do not get exactly the same experience as when running on Nvidia hardware, with AMD hardware using the older OpenGL 4.3 API which makes the game run slower in a lot of cases. Even more confusing is that this performance downgrade was mostly seen on the R9 380, with AMD’s R9 Fury X being affected to a much lesser extent.   

It is clear that DOOM favours Nvidia hardware right now, so at this time, we would recommend that AMD users wait for the game to be patched to support the Vulkan API over the next few weeks, or consider using lower graphics settings or resolution scale in order to maintain a good enough framerate on AMD’s mid-range or lower end products.    

Aside from the performance issues on some of AMD’s modern GPUs DOOM is pretty much what one should expect from a AAA game on the PC, including a wide range of graphical options which include a range of Anti-Aliasing techniques, colourblind options, and an unlocked framerate.     

Graphically DOOM is a masterpiece of a game, providing some high-quality visuals and great environment design. We have certainly seen a lot of games that performed a lot worse than this with much less visual yum-yum, so id Software deserves a thumbs up here. 

When changing the games graphical settings we found that a lot of the time there was very little difference between the games graphical quality in a lot of areas, which is both a good and a bad thing. It is great because users with lower end hardware do not experience much of a visual downgrade but on the other hand, it means that those with higher end hardware do not get much in the way of graphical improvement for their extra GPU grunt.    

In many reasons the PC version of DOOM 2016 is something that should be praised, but right now we see that AMD does get the short end of the stick when it comes to PC performance by being forced to use an older version of the OpenGL API. This change can have a huge effect on the game’s performance for some AMD GPUs, with our R9 380 being quite badly handicapped compared to Nvidia’s GTX 960.

The developers of DOOM do say that Vulkan API support is coming to DOOM shortly after launch, which will hopefully give the game and extra performance bump and level the playing field for some true apples-to-apples testing, but right now a lot of AMD GPU users may experience some performance issues.   

 

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