Doom Eternal’s Ray Tracing Is Excellent
Earlier this year, I bought a new PC featuring an AMD Radeon 6800XT GPU. Although it’s not the best ray tracing card in the world, it’s still quite capable, and it’s the first thing I’ve owned that can fully enable the latest lighting effects across all games. Over time, its console-adjacent architecture should hopefully benefit from smart programming optimizations, especially if other studios follow the excellent examples laid out in Doom Eternal.
Prior to this, the fastest gaming machine in my house was an Xbox Series S. Microsoft’s cheaper console uses the same RDNA2 video architecture as my new video card, but scaled down dramatically to save on cost.
In theory, the Series S is the cheapest machine on the market that supports hardware accelerated ray tracing — but in practice that isn’t always the case. While certain games like Watch Dogs Legion and Metro Exodus feature extremely scaled down ray tracing implementations, many other games cut out their RT modes entirely to keep performance up on Microsoft’s lower end hardware. Those effects are then only deployed for PS5, Series X, and PC…
