DOOM (2016) — Tips & Tricks

AMD cards gain from async compute and AMD Intrinsics. NVIDIA cards see smaller gains. The higher your resolution, the smaller the gain, because you become GPU-limited instead.

id Software explicitly recommended disabling it — external FPS counters measurably affect performance in DOOM. Use the built-in Performance Metrics in Advanced Settings instead.

Window size, resolution and texture quality, plus shadow quality. Restart the game after any Advanced Settings change — they do not always apply live.

DOOMConfig.local sits in Saved Games\id Software\DOOM\base. Commands like r_shadowAtlasWidth 32, vt_filter 0 and vt_MaxAniso 1 make the game viable on hardware the launcher will not even start on.

Add -skiplaunchercheck to Steam launch options if the Bethesda launcher prompt delays or hangs your start.

Before any reinstall, driver sweep or mod change, copy the save folder for DOOM (2016). Cloud saves are convenient but they can also sync a corrupted file back onto your machine — knowing where the local copy lives is what actually protects you.

Launch options, config file edits and INI tweaks are easy to forget. A short note means you can undo a change six months later instead of reverse-engineering your own setup.

Pick a demanding area in DOOM (2016), load the same save and play for the same duration after each change. Judging performance by feel is how people conclude a real improvement did nothing.

Right-click the DOOM (2016) executable, open the Compatibility tab, tick Disable fullscreen optimizations, then open Change high DPI settings and set the scaling override to Application. This resolves black screens, low-resolution output and alt-tab freezes across a large number of Unreal Engine 3 and older DirectX 11 titles.

All three sit in Settings > Gaming. They cost RAM and GPU resources and interfere with fullscreen rendering. Some newer titles do benefit from Game Mode, so test rather than assuming — but start with it off.

Balanced and silent profiles let the CPU and GPU downclock under load. Select High or Ultimate Performance, and monitor temperatures — crashes that appear ten minutes in rather than at launch are very often thermal rather than software.

Several engines rely on virtual memory even with ample RAM, and disabling the page file is a recurring cause of "out of memory" errors on machines with 32 GB installed. Leave Windows in control of it.