DOOM: The Dark Ages is setting out to be one of the most visually impressive games launching this year, as the latest iteration of id Software's proprietary engine has fully embraced cutting-edge technology to deliver a complex game world at high performance.

In a new analysis shared today, the tech experts at Digital Foundry took a first look at what the id Tech 8 engine delivers in the new entry in the series. While the demo that media played did not feature path tracing, it did feature regular ray tracing, which included ray-traced reflections like in DOOM Eternal and ray-traced global illumination in the vein of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which is powered by the same engine.

Both work extremely well. The Siege map, for example, features a lot of reflective surfaces, which wasn't entirely expected, given the change to a more naturalistic environment over past entries in the series. This change also makes ray-traced global illumination shine, delivering more accurate lighting through vast spaces lit almost entirely with natural light sources like fire and the sun. Additionally, the emphasis on dynamic objects and the removal of baked lighting makes said objects blend more seamlessly into the environment, resulting in a more pleasing visual experience.

Besides ray tracing features and the robust physics simulation DOOM: The Dark Ages features, the game also seems to feature a virtualized geometry system similar to Unreal Engine 5's Nanite. While this couldn't be confirmed at the time, the behavior of some visual elements, such as the absence of LOD swapping, heavily suggests this system is being used. Targeting 60 FPS with this virtualized geometry system in place together with high enemy numbers on screen, the ray-traced lighting and reflections, and the physics simulation show the amazing potential of the id Tech 8 engine. What remains to be seen is how it will actually deliver all this on consoles, but id Software has already proved in the past to have the technical chops to deliver solid experiences on all sorts of hardware.