Doom

Doom is the game we point to when someone claims modern engines cannot be both beautiful and fast. id Software's 2016 reboot of the franchise that invented the first-person shooter is, a decade later, still one of the best optimized PC games ever shipped, and our benchmark database proves it at scale: across 3,712 measured CPU and GPU combinations, the average system records 149 FPS at 1080p Ultra, 97 FPS at 1440p Ultra, and 53 FPS at 4K Ultra. The fastest combinations in our data reach 892 FPS at 1080p Low, a number that sounds like a typo until you remember what engine this is. The slowest combo we measured still manages 39 FPS at 1080p Ultra, which means the floor of this game sits where many modern titles put their ceiling. If you are planning a gaming PC build and want one title that will reward every dollar you spend, Doom is the honest benchmark.

id Tech 6: the engine that set the standard

Doom runs on id Tech 6, an engine built around a simple philosophy: feed the GPU, get out of the way. Where many engines of its era leaned on the CPU to prepare enormous scenes, id Tech 6 was designed to keep the processor's workload modest and let the graphics card do what graphics cards do. The practical result shows clearly in our data. Doom is primarily GPU-bound at every resolution, and its CPU appetite is refreshingly reasonable: a modern six-core processor is essentially never the bottleneck, and even quad-cores from several generations back hold their minimums well in all but the busiest demon swarms.

The engine shipped with OpenGL and added Vulkan support shortly after launch, and that Vulkan path matters. On most hardware, and especially on AMD cards of the era with strong asynchronous compute capability, Vulkan delivered a meaningful frame rate lift over OpenGL with no visual difference. If you are playing today, Vulkan is the correct choice on essentially every modern driver stack.

Memory behavior is equally well mannered. The game is comfortable in 8 GB of system RAM, though 16 GB of dual-channel DDR5 or DDR4 removes any chance of streaming hiccups in the largest fights, and dual-channel matters here because integrated and memory-sensitive configurations feel the bandwidth difference immediately. VRAM is the more interesting axis: 4 GB covers 1080p Ultra comfortably, while 1440p and 4K with high virtual texture settings want 6 to 8 GB to keep texture streaming invisible. Storage demands are light by modern standards, though an NVMe SSD still shortens loads and keeps virtual texture paging silent.

1080p: high refresh for everyone

The 1080p Ultra average of 149 FPS is the headline, but the shape of the data is the story. The spread between our measured floor of 39 FPS and ceiling of 561 FPS at 1080p Ultra maps almost perfectly onto GPU generations: anything resembling a modern mid-range card sits deep into triple digits, and only genuinely old or integrated hardware approaches the floor. Even then, 39 FPS at maximum settings is playable, and dropping to Low lifts the weakest combos to a measured 65 FPS average-tier experience.

Settings scaling is gentle and predictable, the signature of a healthy engine. Moving from Ultra to High at 1080p raises the average from 149 to 181 FPS, Medium reaches 212, and Low hits 241. That is a 62 percent swing from worst to best preset, enough to tune for a target without gutting the image.

The practical takeaway: Doom at 1080p is a high-refresh game for almost any discrete GPU built in the last several years. A mid-range card paired with a 144Hz monitor will pin that refresh at High or Ultra, and 240Hz monitors are not fantasy here, the 241 FPS Low average says a strong build genuinely feeds a 240Hz display. For a 2016 title to make 240Hz realistic at 1080p is exactly why this game still anchors our high-refresh recommendations.

1440p and 4K: the GPU takes over completely

At 1440p Ultra the average settles at 97 FPS, with the measured range running from 25 FPS on the weakest combos to 386 FPS on the strongest. The pattern from 1080p holds, just shifted down one tier of hardware: the card that pinned 144Hz at 1080p now pins roughly 100Hz at 1440p. Settings scaling remains consistent, with Low averaging 160, Medium 140, and High 118, so holding a 144Hz refresh at 1440p is a matter of dropping two presets on a mid-range card, or nothing at all on an upper-tier one.

At 4K Ultra the 53 FPS average marks the only resolution where the average system falls short of 60. The floor of 13 FPS and ceiling of 228 FPS tell you this is purely a GPU conversation now; the CPU stopped mattering several tiers ago. Stepping down to High lifts the average to 64 FPS, Medium to 76, and Low to 87, and each step costs less visual quality than you would expect because Doom's art direction holds up remarkably at lower presets.

One honest note on upscaling: Doom predates DLSS and FSR, so there is no native temporal upscaler in the menu. What the game does offer is dynamic resolution scaling, which adjusts internal resolution on the fly to hold a frame rate target, and it works well. Driver-level FSR or third-party frame scaling tools can fill the gap if you want more, but most players at 4K will find the built-in dynamic resolution plus the High preset entirely sufficient.

Recommended settings: our tested configuration

Doom's presets are unusually trustworthy, but a tuned configuration still beats them. Start from Ultra and make targeted cuts, because several of the most expensive options are also the least visible in Doom's fast, dark, motion-heavy combat.

Shadows quality is the first reduction: the difference between Ultra and High is nearly impossible to spot while strafing through a firefight, and it buys a real chunk of frame rate. Virtual texture page pool quality, the MegaTexture cache, should match your VRAM: set it to High on 6 GB cards, Ultra on 8 GB and above, because pushing it past your VRAM causes the one stutter this engine has, texture cache misses. Reflections and post-processing effects like motion blur and depth of field are personal calls, but competitive players should kill motion blur on principle; it costs frames and clarity and Doom's shotgun deserves better. Anti-aliasing is worth keeping: the game's TSSAA is cheap and removes the shimmer that ruins long sightlines in the bigger arenas. Enable dynamic resolution scaling with a target of your monitor's refresh rate rather than locking a static resolution below native; the engine scales smoothly enough that you will rarely notice it working. Finally, switch the API to Vulkan unless you have a specific reason not to, and cap your frame rate a few frames below your monitor's ceiling if you want the steadiest frame pacing.

That profile typically lands within a few percent of our measured High numbers while looking closer to Ultra, which at 1080p means roughly 180 FPS on the average system.

What hardware do you need?

Entry level (older quad-core, 8 GB RAM, aging or integrated graphics): 1080p Low at 40 to 65 FPS based on our lower-percentile data, and genuinely playable. Doom is one of the few action games where this tier is not a compromise story; the engine was built to scale down as gracefully as it scales up. A decade-old budget card still runs the campaign smoothly with sensible settings.

Mid-range (modern six-core, 16 GB RAM, mid-tier GPU): the sweet spot, and it is enormous. Expect 1080p Ultra at 130 to 180 FPS and 1440p High at 100 to 120 FPS on typical hardware in this class. This tier pins a 144Hz monitor at 1080p without touching a setting, which makes it the correct target for most players. If someone asks for the best graphics card for Doom at sane money, the answer lives here: a current mid-range card is not "enough," it is overkill in the best way.

High-end (fast six or eight-core, 16 to 32 GB, strong GPU): 1080p at 200 FPS and beyond, 1440p Ultra at 130 to 180, and 4K High at a steady 60 to 90. This is 240Hz territory at 1080p and high-refresh territory at 1440p, with 4K becoming comfortable rather than compromised.

Flagship: 4K Ultra at 120 FPS and higher, with the strongest combos in our data reaching 228 FPS at 4K Ultra and 892 at 1080p Low. At this tier Doom stops being a question of whether it runs well and becomes a demonstration of what your monitor can display. It remains one of the best games ever made for showing off a high-refresh 4K panel.

Laptop playability

Doom is about as laptop-friendly as a demanding-looking game gets, because its GPU-bound profile plays to the one component gaming laptops actually have. A laptop with a mobile mid-range GPU and a proper cooling solution sits comfortably in the 100-plus FPS range at 1080p High, which is exactly what the 144Hz panels common on gaming laptops want. The caveats are the usual laptop ones, not Doom ones: thin-and-light machines with integrated graphics land near our measured floor, playable at Low but nothing more, and laptops that throttle under sustained load will sag during long fights because Doom holds the GPU at full tilt for entire levels. Keep the machine on a hard surface, keep it plugged in, and set the Windows power mode correctly, and Doom will treat a gaming laptop better than almost anything released since.

Streaming and content creation

Doom is an easy game to broadcast, and the reason is its restraint on the CPU. Because the engine leaves processor cores idle relative to most modern titles, a streaming setup has real headroom to work with. The standard advice still holds: use a hardware encoder, NVENC on Nvidia cards or AMF on AMD, and the cost of a clean 1080p60 stream drops to nearly nothing in both performance and quality tradeoffs. What Doom's light CPU load changes is the fallback: CPU x264 encoding at a fast preset is actually viable here on an eight-core processor, which is more than can be said for most games in our library, so single-PC streamers without a modern NVENC generation still have a good path.

For capture and archival work, the game's motion is the challenge, not the hardware. Doom at 150-plus FPS with constant fast camera movement is brutal on low-bitrate encoding, so give the stream bitrate headroom or record locally at high quality and encode later. On the production side, the same GPU headroom that makes Doom easy to stream makes it a pleasant neighbor on a video editing workstation: you can capture, cut, and encode on one machine without the game and the editor fighting over resources.

Common problems and fixes

Blurry or late-loading textures mid-fight: the virtual texture page pool is set above your VRAM. Drop it one step and the hitching disappears immediately.

Lower FPS than every benchmark shows: check the API. If the game is running OpenGL instead of Vulkan on hardware where Vulkan wins, you are leaving a measurable chunk of performance on the table.

Stutter on an otherwise strong system: almost always storage or memory configuration. Move the install to an SSD, an NVMe SSD if you have one, and confirm your RAM is running in dual-channel at its rated speed rather than a single stick at default clocks.

Frame pacing feels wrong despite high FPS: cap the frame rate to your monitor's refresh or just under it. Doom will happily render 400 FPS, but uncapped output beyond your display's refresh buys you heat and tearing, not smoothness.

Low FPS on a laptop with good specs: power limits. Plug in, set the high-performance plan, and verify the discrete GPU is actually being used rather than the integrated one.

Upgrade priorities

Doom's upgrade order is the traditional one, which is itself a compliment. First, the graphics card: the game is GPU-bound at every resolution, so a GPU upgrade translates directly into frames, and a CPU upgrade should almost never be your first move for this game. Second, the monitor, and this is specific to Doom: because even mid-range hardware produces very high frame rates, moving from a 60Hz panel to a 144Hz or 240Hz monitor is the single most visible upgrade most owners of this game can make. Third, memory configuration: if you are on a single stick, moving to dual-channel is cheap and removes the rare streaming stutter. Storage and processor come last; an SSD improves loads, and the CPU only matters if yours is genuinely ancient.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Is Doom (2016) still worth playing in 2026?

A: Yes. The campaign remains a benchmark for shooter pacing and combat design, and on modern hardware it runs at frame rates that make it feel better than it did at launch. It also goes on deep sale constantly, which makes it one of the best value propositions in PC gaming.

Q: What are the average FPS numbers for Doom?

A: Across 3,712 tested CPU and GPU combinations in our database, Doom averages 149 FPS at 1080p Ultra, 97 FPS at 1440p Ultra, and 53 FPS at 4K Ultra, with a measured range from 39 FPS up to 892 FPS depending on hardware and settings.

Q: Is Doom CPU or GPU intensive?

A: Firmly GPU-intensive, which is why it scales so well. Any modern six-core CPU is effectively never the bottleneck; the graphics card decides your frame rate at every resolution, and only genuinely old quad-cores show strain in the largest fights.

Q: Can Doom run on a low-end PC or integrated graphics?

A: Yes, within reason. The weakest combinations in our data still average 39 FPS at 1080p Ultra and 65 FPS at Low, so integrated graphics and aging budget cards can play the full campaign smoothly at reduced settings.

Q: Does Doom support DLSS or FSR upscaling?

A: Not natively, the game predates both. It does include dynamic resolution scaling, which adjusts internal resolution to hold your frame rate target and accomplishes most of what an upscaler would. Driver-level FSR is an option if you want more.

Q: Should I use Vulkan or OpenGL for Doom?

A: Vulkan, in almost every case. It delivered higher frame rates than OpenGL on most hardware at launch and the gap has only widened with modern drivers. Only fall back to OpenGL if you hit a specific stability issue on very old hardware.

Doom's place in 2026

Ten years after release, Doom occupies a strange and useful position: it is simultaneously a classic, a benchmark, and a proof. As a classic, its campaign still outpaces most shooters made since, and its player counts get a bump every time a sale or a franchise anniversary rolls around. As a benchmark, it remains one of the most-looked-up titles in our library precisely because its optimization makes it a clean test of GPU power without CPU noise; when we want to know what a graphics card can do, this is one of the first games we reach for. And as a proof, it stands as the industry's reminder that a team with discipline can ship a game that looks spectacular and runs on everything, that the 892 FPS ceiling and the 39 FPS floor in our data come from the same executable and the same art.

For the reader checking this page before a purchase, the guidance is unusually simple. Whatever you are considering buying, Doom will run well on it, and the only real decisions are how high a refresh rate you want to feed and at what resolution. In a library full of games that punish hardware, Doom is the one that rewards it.