RTX 50-Series Laptops Test with Doom: The Dark Ages!

Doom: The Dark Ages just dropped, and - spoiler alert - it’s amazing. If you’ve had your eye on it and are also considering an upgrade to a new RTX 50-series laptop, this is the feature for you. Joseph just dropped his review of the Razer Blade 16 yesterday, and I’ve been testing it alongside him. In this feature, I’ll be taking a look at Doom in particular and how well it runs on this laptop… and it’s as straightforward as you might imagine. 

It’s a killer shooter and a killer laptop, but do those two things combine to make a killer pick for your next gaming laptop? That’s what we’ll be exploring, and we’ll also be answering whether or not the same holds true if you don’t go for the best of the best GPUs. Find out, in this breakdown.

The Razer Blade 16 - to RTX 5090 or not to RTX 5090?

Let’s get this out of the way from the outset: the Razer Blade 16 isn’t the most powerful option for a laptop with an RTX 5090. Despite this, it’s managed to win the top spot in my laptop rotation this generation for everything surrounding its gaming performance. It’s thin, light, and exceptionally well built  with a thickness of 0.69” and a total weight of only 4.6 pounds. Its glossy OLED screen is downright gorgeous and super smooth with a 240Hz refresh rate. Even under full load, while certainly audible, this year’s Blade 16 avoids sounding like a jet engine. It also just feels right to use, with a great feeling keyboard and a reliable touchpad. 

Frankly, that it’s even possible to have a laptop with an RTX 5090 in this form factor is impressive. And while 4.6 pounds is hardly the thinnest and lightest if that’s all you care about, it’s slim enough to be much more portable than typical gaming laptops. It just works, integrating easily and seamlessly into daily life with one of the best user experiences released this year.

The trade-off comes in power and performance. A reality of this laptop is that it has a power ceiling to keep its temperatures in check; 150W TGP versus its 170W maximum. I was initially worried about this, especially since the Blade 16 is as expensive as it is (around $4,500 for the RTX 5090 version), but now that I’ve been using it for a while, I genuinely don’t miss it when the laptop as a whole is so very nice. 

Joseph echoed the same sentiments in his review, but this is obviously subjective and easy for us to say when we’re sent loan samples. But rest assured, you don’t need to spend $4,500 on a 50-series laptop unless you value what it has to offer, and it’s possible to have a great experience with a much more affordable version.

For this article, I was able to test Doom: The Dark Ages with the Blade 16, as well as two other laptops: a RTX 5080 from Gigagyte and another RTX 5070 Ti model that I’m not allowed to talk about yet. 

For those who don’t know, I cover gaming laptops, monitors, and furniture for IGN in addition to my duties here, so I have a lot of opportunities to try different laptops.

Doom: The Dark Ages, Meet the Razer Blade 16

Doom: The Dark Ages (TDA) is a beautiful game. It's built on the new idTech8 engine, which features full support for ray tracing, DLSS Super Resolution, and Ray Reconstruction. It's one of a growing list of games that offer these DLSS 4 features and is wholly better for it. As I’ll break down in this section, it’s worth turning on all of these features and enjoying the game in that state. To my eye, there is genuinely no reason not to. 

A game as graphically intense as The Dark Ages comes at a significant performance cost. Ray Traced global illumination, high-res textures, wave upon wave of particle effects, and far more enemies on the screen that either Doom 2016 or Doom: Eternal, are enough to tax any system — though, I have to give kudos to Id for optimizing TDA as well as it has.

I began my test with everything set to its highest in the graphics menu and running at the Razer Blade 16's native resolution of 1600p. For starters, I didn't use DLSS and instead went with TAA, which is the default setting (it's not possible to totally disable). I wanted to get a baseline for how it would run on the RTX 5090 and especially how it would run with the limited power envelope present on the Blade 16.

It performed impressively with all of its bells and whistles turned on, and without the help of DLSS 4, it was able to average about 60 FPS. It would occasionally dip below or extend a few frames higher, but the RTX 5090 was able to provide a very playable baseline for a fluid shooter like this. I played it for around an hour at these settings to get a good idea of how it might change with different calibers of fight, but it held steady. 

Turning on DLSS sans multi-frame generation made a big impact. Because I wanted to push the hardware, I left DLSS set to quality mode. This instantly bumped it to around 90 FPS. When things got intense on the screen, it would sometimes dip closer to 80 FPS but never went lower than that. 

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: DLSS, at its best, feels like magic, and that’s what you’re getting here. Even though the game is being rendered at a lower resolution and is being upscaled and rebuilt using the latest version of Super Resolution and DLSS Ray Reconstruction, you wouldn't guess it by looking at gameplay. 

Even when I stopped and tried to pixel peep, I wasn't able to pick out anything at all that was downgraded in the process. I was able to see this tech being demoed at CES with Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K and was impressed. It’s something else to try that same test on your own with a completely different game and find that it holds true. In fact, when you really pixel peep, some details actually appear more crisp because of the way in which the new Transformer model handles upscaling and processing these images. 

Rip and tear, rip and tear. While it's obvious that the 50-series is powerful, being the latest release from Nvidia, and all, I've really enjoyed being able to have such a desktop-like experience sitting on my couch. With the Razer Blade 16 being as light as it is, and DLSS working as well as it does in conjunction with an already powerful laptop GPU, the entire experience is refreshingly freeing.

With tools like multi-frame generation now available, there really isn’t even a sense of major sacrifice in performance or smoothness, which has long been a pervasive issue for desktop gamers transitioning to laptop. 

To MFG or Not MFG?

I’m going to get on my soapbox regarding multi-frame generation for a moment, so if you'd rather not hear my thoughts on multiframe generation broadly, you can skip ahead now.

Ahead of, and unrelated to this review, I had a conversation with one of my contacts at Nvidia. The crux of the conversation, at least in the part I am describing here, was about the narrative surrounding multiframe generation. By now, you have surely heard the talk of "fake frames". Because the RTX 50 – series leverages AI much more heavily than anything to come before it, and emphasizes an oral rendering in its approach to frame generation, it's able to generate up to four times the rasterized frames. It's not incorrect to say that these are fake frames, but it is dismissive in a way that strikes me wrong.

While I firmly believe that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, I think selling up the technology in such simple terms misses the point. Yes, there are situations where ghosting is visible. There are also situations where you can perceive slightly higher latency which makes using MFG unappealing.

It's also true that most of the time it's pretty much a non-issue. When you're actually playing a game, objects are in motion. Frequently, fast motion. This is far different than the typical scenario you'll see in YouTube videos in published articles online. Most of the time, it just works. You don't notice much other than the increased smoothness of gameplay and your frame rate which has multiplied itself with a simple toggle.

That is exactly the case with Doom: The Dark Ages. As you consider whether to turn MFG on or leave it off and just enjoy DLSS, you can be confident that if you do choose to use it, it's one of the best representations of the technology out there currently.

An important caveat here is that you should target your monitor's refresh rate. If you are running a 240Hz display like the Razer Blade 16 I used, you should only set the frame multiplier to get you as close as possible to that frame rate. Anything more is lost and only introduces more room for the experience to tip the other way and introduce added latency or tearing.

To keep things nice and simple here's how my in game FPS broke down at 1600p:

• Native resolution, max settings, TAA: 55 – 65 FPS
• DLSS Quality, max settings: 85 – 95 FPS
• DLSS Quality, max settings, 4X MFG: 230 – 240 FPS

After testing it for myself and verifying that I couldn't see any visible artifacts in normal gameplay, I set my multiplier to 4X and just focused on having fun with the game. And have fun I did.

If you're playing on lower tier hardware, but still part of the 50 series, you can still count on these features being available. As I tested my two other laptops, there was the expected scale down in performance, but the relative jumps remained mostly the same. Unfortunately, I didn't have an FHD laptop to test, so all of my results are at 1600p. With a lower resolution, however, in-game FPS will only improve.

Doom: The Dark Ages Impressions

Doom: The Dark Ages may just be my favorite Doom game ever. I’m not finished yet, and Jason has already covered the full review while I share technical impressions, but I have to talk about it. Doom is great. Compared to Eternal, there are some major improvements here, though it's different enough that I could see many people still preferring Eternal, depending on how they favor shooters in general. 

The biggest gameplay change this go around is how much more grounded the Slayer is. While Eternal had you double-jumping and dashing in a flurry of motion, The Dark Ages hews far close to classic Doom. You can still sprint, and dash, and jump, and there are jump pads which will launch you into the air, but you’re not spending as much time flying through the air and shooting enemies from above.

The plot is sillier than ever, but if you’re a fan, it will give insight into the lore TDA’s predecessors only hinted at. The settings are incredibly cool. The mix of science fiction and fantasy tropes meshed with aliens and hell arisen is a treat for the eyes and is perpetually interesting. You can see how the artists were able to stretch their wings and take creative liberties throughout. The Blade 16 uses an OLED monitor and, with HDR turned on — heck, even without — it looks stunning. 

The gunplay is fantastic. ID has been on point in this department for years, and The Dark Ages is no exception. The shotgun especially has a visceral power to it that is immediately addictive. Even after I had fleshed out my arsenal, I kept going back to it. Even in base mode, it's a heck of a lot of fun.

Another major change coming this time around is how many enemies are on screen. Doom Eternal already had a lot, but The Dark Ages adds to that substantially. Right from the first real level, there are instances where you look down at the stage to come, and it is just littered with demons waiting to be slaughtered. It makes the settings feel more real and adds to a grandiosity that pervades throughout the game. 

Even so, playing the game at standard difficulty almost feels like it's on easy mode. The new parry system is a lot of fun, but without turning it up to Nightmare, the window is wide enough that it's very easy to pull off to trigger a powerful counter. TDA isn't afraid to turn up the intensity, and don't get me wrong, there were times when I died on standard difficulty, though not nearly as much as Doom Eternal. Ammo is also much more plentiful, and I found myself running out significantly less, which also makes the game a bit easier.

That won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I didn't mind it. The Dark Ages feels much more about the viscerality of combat than the momentum of movement. It's destruction versus defense, though it never entirely loses sight of any of those factors. Put simply, it's its own well-balanced beast that is an absolute blast to play through. Pun absolutely intended. 

Final Thoughts

If you read my review of the Razer Blade 16 over at IGN, then you already know how I feel about this laptop and the hardware within. It's outstanding, and the RTX 5090 laptop I've chosen to carry with me through the day. While it is power limited, the RTX 5090 still blasts. DLSS 4, with its ray reconstruction and advanced super resolution upscaling, provides a major boost to performance without visible trade-offs. There’s no reason not to use it. 

And if you go with a gaming laptop that’s thicker and heavier with the same GPU, unbound by thermal limitations, your results will be even better.

If you’ve been on the fence, wondering if the new 50-series laptops can handle this game at max settings, high resolution, high refresh rate, you can be assured: it slays.