RX 9070 XT Doom The Dark Ages FPS: Performance Benchmark & Best Settings

Quick Answer

The RX 9070 XT delivers strong performance in Doom: The Dark Ages, hitting 80 to 110 FPS at 1440p on Ultra settings without ray tracing and 55 to 75 FPS with full ray tracing enabled. Enabling FSR 4 with Quality mode adds 30 to 50 percent more frames with minimal visual quality loss, making it an excellent value for this title.

RX 9070 XT Baseline Performance in Doom: The Dark Ages

Doom: The Dark Ages is built on id Software''s updated id Tech 8 engine and pushes rasterisation performance hard while also offering a demanding ray-tracing path for reflections, shadows, and global illumination. The RX 9070 XT, based on AMD''s RDNA 4 architecture, handles the rasterisation workload particularly well thanks to its improved compute units and higher memory bandwidth over the previous RDNA 3 generation. At 1080p Ultra settings without ray tracing, the 9070 XT regularly exceeds 130 FPS, providing headroom for 144Hz and 165Hz monitor users. At 1440p Ultra, expect 80 to 110 FPS depending on scene complexity. The opening levels and outdoor environments push frame rates toward the higher end of that range, while dense interior scenes with many dynamic light sources drop toward 80 to 90 FPS. For 4K Ultra without FSR, the 9070 XT averages 45 to 60 FPS, which is playable but benefits from FSR 4 assistance.

Ray Tracing Performance and Best Settings

The Dark Ages'' ray-tracing implementation is one of the more demanding seen in an id Software title. With full ray tracing enabled at 1440p, the RX 9070 XT delivers 55 to 75 FPS. Selectively disabling ray-traced reflections while keeping ray-traced shadows active recovers 15 to 20 FPS with a smaller visual impact. The recommended ray tracing configuration for 1440p with the 9070 XT is ray-traced shadows on, ray-traced reflections off, and global illumination at Medium ray-tracing quality. This gives you meaningful visual improvement over pure rasterisation while keeping frames above 60 FPS in demanding scenes.

Using FSR 4 to Maximise Performance

The RX 9070 XT natively supports AMD FSR 4 with its machine-learning upscaling capability. In Doom: The Dark Ages, FSR 4 at Quality mode (rendering at approximately 77 percent of the output resolution) recovers substantial frame rate overhead with impressive image quality retention. At 1440p with FSR 4 Quality and ray tracing enabled, the 9070 XT averages 85 to 105 FPS, making smooth high-refresh gameplay possible even with the ray-tracing path active. FSR 4 Ultra Quality mode is the better choice for 4K users who want near-native visual fidelity.

Frequently Asked Questions

What settings should I use for the best RX 9070 XT performance in Doom: The Dark Ages at 1440p? Set texture quality and shadow quality to Ultra, disable ray-traced reflections, keep ray-traced shadows on Medium or High, and enable FSR 4 Quality. This configuration delivers 90-plus FPS in most scenes at 1440p.

How does the RX 9070 XT compare to previous AMD GPUs in this title? The 9070 XT is meaningfully faster than the RX 7900 GRE and competes closely with the RX 7900 XT in The Dark Ages, offering better performance at its price point due to RDNA 4''s improved shader efficiency in id Tech engine workloads.

Is 8GB VRAM enough for Doom: The Dark Ages at 4K? The RX 9070 XT ships with 16GB GDDR6, so VRAM is not a limiting factor. At 4K Ultra with high-resolution texture packs, the game can use 10GB or more of VRAM, making the 16GB buffer important for future-proofing.