Before the release, there were all kinds of ambiguities about the system requirements of Doom Eternal. At first they were very high, whereupon they were corrected down by Bethesda. In our test, we examined how realistic the final information is.
Hardware Unboxed, however, has examined the performance of older graphics cards in Doom Eternal and comes to a remarkable result. Even the eight-year-old AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition packs the first-person shooter with more than 60 fps, leaving even some more modern adversaries behind.
Where does the HD 7970 GHz Edition fit in?
Officially, Bethesda sets the limit for the minimum system requirements for the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050 Ti (Q4 2016) and the AMD Radeon R9 280 (Q2 2014).
However, according to Hardware Unboxed at 1080p resolution and low quality settings, the HD 7970 GHz manages to leave both and achieves an average of 65 fps – without dynamic resolution. The much newer GTX 1050 Ti reaches 61 fps.
The AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition leaves the GTX 1050 Ti behind in Doom Eternal. (Image source: Youtube / Hardware Unboxed)
Older Nvidia GPUs perform significantly worse
The roughly the same old Nvidia Geforce GTX 680 (Q1 2012) is less than half as fast as the HD 7970 GHz in Doom Eternal – it achieves an average of 29 fps – even though, according to UserBenchmark, it should only be around 4 percent slower than the normal one Radeon HD 7970 (for the difference from HD 7970 to HD 7970 GHz Edition see below).
The same applies to the GTX 780 (Q2 2013), which according to UserBenchmark should even be significantly faster. It only manages 33 fps in Doom Eternal. Even the GTX 960 (Q4 2014) is significantly behind the HD 7970 GHz with 46 fps.
Why is that? Hardware Unboxed suspects, among other things, poorly optimized drivers as the reason for the poor performance of older Nvidia graphics cards. In addition, AMD GPUs in cooperation with the Vulkan API often perform better than their Nvidia counterparts.
Background on the HD 7970 GHz Edition
The normal Radeon HD 7970 was released in the fourth quarter of 2011 with a clock rate of 925 MHz. In mid-2012, the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition followed, which, as the name suggests, clocks at 1,000 MHz (1.0 / 1.05 GHz base / boost). Both are based on AMD's GCN (Graphics Core Next) 1.0 architecture.
