Doom The Dark Ages Best Settings for Steam Deck and ROG Ally

Gamers with handhelds such as the Steam Deck and ROG Ally must dial in these Doom: The Dark Ages settings for optimal performance.

Before you begin, Steam Deck users: Valve has issued a SteamOS update to make the game at least run. You must update that before you start the optimization process. As for ROG Ally users, ensure you have the latest chipset drivers and BIOS for optimum performance. Once you update your drivers, chipset, and OS version, follow the settings below.

Note: Gaming on Handhelds is fun, but a title as heavy as Dark Ages is quite challenging for these devices. At least it’s running at around 30FPS, which portrays how far ID has optimized this title.

Best Settings for Deck and ROG Ally in Doom: The Dark Ages

A Few Keynotes to Consider:

Handhelds have come far, but for 60FPS, the performance isn’t quite there yet.
RX 780M within the ROG Ally is more powerful than the Steam Deck’s Van Gogh GPU, but it isn’t enough for the Dark Ages.
You can increase the texture pool for better image quality on your ROG Ally and other models with more RAM.

Best Settings Explored

Setting	Steam Deck	Rog Ally / X
Window Mode	Fullscreen	Fullscreen
Aspect Ratio	16:9 (or native)	16:9 (or native)
Resolution	1280×720 / closest	1280×720 / closest
Refresh Rate	Highest available	Highest available
Vertical Sync	Off (On if tearing)	Off (On if tearing)
Present From Compute	On	On
Resolution Scaling Mode	Off	Off
Resolution Scale	100%	100%
Field of View	90–100 (personal)	90–100 (personal)
Chromatic Aberration	Off	Off
Depth of Field	Off	Off
Sharpening	Default/personal	Default/personal
Film Grain	Off	Off
Motion Blur	Off	Off
Upscaler (NVIDIA)	N/A	N/A
DLSS Frame Generation	N/A	N/A
Upscaler (AMD)	FSR Ultra Performance	FSR Ultra Performance
FSR Frame Generation	Off (base framerate is very low)	Off (base framerate is very low)
NVIDIA Reflex Mode	N/A	N/A
Overall Quality Slider	Low	Low
Texture Pool Size	1024	1024
Shadow Quality	Low	Low
Reflections Quality	Low	Low
Lights Quality	Low	Low
Particles Quality	Low	Low
Decal Quality	Low	Low
Water Quality	Low	Low
Volumetrics Quality	Low	Low
Texture Filtering Quality	Low	Low
Geometric Quality	Low	Low
Shading Quality	Low	Low
Directional Occlusion	Low	Low

That wraps up the recommendations for today’s handheld settings for Steam Deck and ROG Ally / Ally X. If a 720p image with upscaling looks too mushy, you can lock to 25 or even 30 and maybe experiment with upping your screen resolution. If your device overheats, close the game and let it cool off, then play after a while.

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