Want to play Doom The Dark Ages with path tracing? Don't buy an AMD Radeon GPU
The latest AMD Radeon GPUs may have wowed us in most of our game benchmarks, but I've recently been trying them out with the new path tracing mode in Doom The Dark Ages, and found that this is one area where AMD still has a substantial game of Nvidia catch-up to play. Path tracing is a highly demanding form of pure ray tracing that makes gaming graphics look super realistic, and AMD says its latest GPUs can do it, but my test results show that Nvidia has a big upper hand here.
As I found in my recent AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT review, you don't need an Nvidia GPU to run Doom The Dark Ages at decent settings - even at the Ultra Nightmare settings, which includes a lot of ray-traced eye candy, this budget AMD GPU will run the game at 74fps. However, path tracing is a different story. This advanced form of ray tracing isn't supported by many games yet, but it does make a substantial difference to the lighting in a scene, making for a much more realistic image.
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