How to boost FPS in Doom The Dark Ages

Players have been looking for ways to boost FPS options in Doom The Dark Ages, especially without tanking the game's visuals. The game can be quite the resource hog, and that’s putting it lightly. Even high-end systems struggle to maintain smoothness if the wrong settings are left on.

Read on to learn how to boost FPS in Doom The Dark Ages.

Note: This guide exclusively addresses in-game settings and provides real-time workarounds to enhance FPS. It’s not a guaranteed fix, and the results will vary based on your system and hardware.

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Ways to boost FPS in Doom The Dark Ages

If you’ve got a 144 Hz screen but it’s stuck at 60 Hz, you're already leaving performance off the table (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming || Bethesda Softworks)

Start with Video settings

Head to the Video tab in Settings. Stick to Fullscreen mode — not borderless or windowed — for better latency and smoother performance. Make sure your resolution and refresh rate match your monitor.

V-Sync should be turned off unless you're experiencing significant screen tearing. Additionally, “Present from Compute” might help to boost FPS — keep it enabled unless overlays like Discord or OBS begin to behave erratically.

Read on: Doom The Dark Ages ending explained

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Stop using TAA

Strangely, by default, Doom The Dark Ages picks TAA as the upscaler, even if you're on an RTX card. Switch to DLSS if you’re on Nvidia, or FSR for AMD. These look way better and offer a real performance lift. If you own a 40-series GPU, you’ll also get Frame generation support through DLSS 3 or DLSS 4, which adds a good chunk of extra FPS with low latency.

Don’t have a 40-series? No worries — using FSR with frame generation still helps. Set the upscaler to Quality mode, which is the sweet spot for balancing image quality and framerate.

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Performance overlay

You can tweak the Performance metrics overlay. If you just want to see the FPS, pick Low. If you want more info, like what upscaler is active or if ray tracing is on, pick Medium. However, don’t use Ultra Nightmare unless you want your screen covered in debug graphs.

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Minor gains: Motion blur, Film grain, Sharpening

These do not significantly boost FPS gains, but can help:

• Film grain adds visual noise that eats up encoder bandwidth during recording. Turn it off if you're streaming.
• Sharpening can be personalized — higher values make the image clearer, especially if you use DLSS or FSR.
• Motion blur and Chromatic Aberration won’t do much for performance. Turn them off if you want a cleaner image.

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Texture and filtering settings

Now, in the Advanced video settings, focus on texture quality and texture filtering. These can be cranked up as long as your VRAM usage stays under control.

If your card has 10 GB VRAM, don’t let the game push it to the full limit, and leave about 5-10% of VRAM unused. For a 10 GB card, that means staying under ~9.2 GB. You can see this number live at the bottom-right corner of the screen when you tweak texture settings.

Higher texture pool size and filtering quality give better visuals with almost no FPS hit if your VRAM allows.

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Resolution scaling: Turn off dynamic, use manual upscaling

Turn off the resolution scaling mode. The dynamic setting keeps shifting resolution, which can mess with clarity. Instead, set DLSS or FSR to Quality mode and adjust sharpening to taste manually. This allows a stable appearance and a more consistent FPS.

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Nvidia Reflex helps

If you’re on Nvidia, go down to the Nvidia Reflex Mode. Turn this on if your system has a decent CPU. But if your CPU is on the weaker side, use On + Boost, which helps reduce input latency and enhances the gameplay experience, meaning it can boost FPS.

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Skip motion blur and HDR if you want

HDR doesn’t tank performance, so keep it on if your screen supports it. Motion blur, on the other hand, is purely for visuals. Turn it off if you don’t like the effect or are prone to motion sickness. There is no real FPS gain here; this is just about visual preference.

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Choose your preset wisely

Don’t trust ‘low’ settings to boost FPS all the time in Doom The Dark Ages (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming || Bethesda Softworks)

Even on the lowest settings, Doom The Dark Ages is still rough on older or handheld hardware. For example, on an RTX 3080 Ti at 2K, here’s the rough FPS across presets:

• Low: 73+ FPS+
• Medium: 70 FPS+
• High: 66 FPS+
• Ultra: 65 FPS+
• Nightmare: 63 FPS+
• Ultra Nightmare: 63 FPS+

Honestly, Medium is the best balance to boost FPS. The visuals look great, and it doesn’t hit your FPS too hard. The jump from Low to Medium barely affects frames, but you gain better detail and lighting. Stick with Medium, and then fine-tune from there.

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Watch for Path tracing (if added later)

At the moment, Path tracing isn’t live in the settings but is expected in a future patch. If and when it does show up, be careful — enabling it will likely compromise the FPS unless you're on absolute top-tier hardware.

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That concludes our guide to boost FPS in Doom The Dark Ages.

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