Agenda

We will present a breakdown of how a typical frame is rendered in idTech 8 and DOOM: The Dark Ages, which was developed by id Software and released in May 2025 on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and PC to critical acclaim.
The focus of this talk lies on the new geometry rendering pipeline that evolved from a pure clustered Forward+ approach into a hybrid solution that utilizes a visibility buffer, compute-based material dispatch, deferred texturing, tile classification and deferred lighting to achieve optimal performance across a wide range of platforms. Furthermore, we'll present a custom solution to software-based Variable-Rate Compute Shaders (VRCS) that helps to control shading rate in a fully compute-based lighting pipeline. In addition, we will also show how we implemented a seamless opaque mesh blending that smoothly blends mesh-intersections, advances in our shadow rendering techniques, as well as the GPU-based triangle-culling approach employed in DOOM: The Dark Ages.

Takeaway

Attendees will get an overview of how a frame is rendered in DOOM: The Dark Ages and gain a deep understanding of the new geometry rendering pipeline developed for idTech 8 – utilizing visibility buffers, deferred texturing and variable-rate compute shaders. The talk offers practical advice, implementation details and performance profiles.

Intended Audience

The target audience are engine programmers, rendering engineers, everyone interested in GPU optimization and of course people interested in some rendering secrets of the new DOOM game.