Doom: The Dark Ages ray tracing might have killed your frame rate, but at least it saved 110GB of disk space

id Software said Doom: The Dark Ages switched from pre-baked global illumination to real-time ray tracing because its much larger maps made baked lighting impractical.

The studio said baked lighting could have added 44GB to 110GB of data and required 27 to 68 days to render each full iteration.

Using ray tracing helped cut development bottlenecks and storage demands for the bigger game.

The tradeoff was higher hardware requirements, with some players seeing worse performance.