Doom: The Dark Ages is a great-looking game, leveraging the ray tracing enhancements that the latest iteration of iDTech affords the blood-soaked shooter. But if you're on PC, then you can unlock the true potential of the engine with the awaited path tracing update, at the expense of a lot of performance.
For those unfamiliar, path tracing is an all-encompassing form of ray tracing, which simulates how rays of light bounce off surfaces, that is far more demanding. Objects shoot out more rays and allow those rays to bounce around a scene more than once, leading to far more accurate lighting, better ambient occlusion, and better reflections and surface material approximations. It is, when implemented correctly, a night-and-day difference to standard ray tracing techniques, albeit only afforded by some of the best hardware on the market.
Path tracing can be transformative in Doom: The Dark Ages, if you find the right scene to do some comparisons, and it's interior spaces seem to benefit the most. Light bounces and illuminates objects in ways that standard ray tracing can't afford, while the contrast between the areas where light is meant to be, and where it definitely shouldn't, are more naturally defined. Digital Foundry has released an extensive look at many of the improvements path tracing affords, which gives you a good idea if the additional visual flair is worth it.
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