Doom Eternal Performance Issues – Lag Fix, FPS Drops

Doom Eternal Performance Issues – Lag Fix, FPS Drops – The fifth iteration of the well known Doom series is here, the last game was released back in 2016 and it took Bethesda around 4 to make another one. People have high hopes with the franchise as usual and are expecting it to be a great one.

In Doom Eternal, you will play as the Doom Slayer and take down the Hell Armies that have invaded to earth to save humanity. You can use weapons of your liking, there are melee weapons, Combat Shotgun, BFG 9000, Plasma Rifle, Super Shotgun, Heavy Cannon, Rocket Launcher, etc. A new set of movement mechanics have also been introduced in the game, we will leave it for you to find that out. There’s one more new mode called “Enter Battlemode” a 2v1 PvP experience where the doom slayer gets to fight with two player-controlled demons.

Early reviews of the game are amazing, almost all big gaming magazines have already reviewed the game. The ratings are as follows.

Enough about the game, as expected the game is not as polished as everyone expected it to be. Doom Eternal users are facing various issues such as lagging and random FPS Drops. In this article, we will find out how to take care of these issues.

The developer is aware of these issues, expect an performance-related update soon.

Fix Doom Eternal Lag

System Requirements

Minimum:

• OS: Windows 10
• Processor: Intel Core i5 @ 3.3 GHz or better, or AMD Ryzen 3 @ 3.1 GHz or better
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050Ti (4GB), GTX 1060 (3GB), GTX 1650 (4GB) or AMD Radeon R9 280(3GB), AMD Radeon R9 290 (4GB), RX 470 (4GB)
• Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Storage: 50 GB available space

Recommended:

• OS: 64-bit Windows 10
• Processor: Intel Core i7-6700K or better, or AMD Ryzen 7 1800X or better
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB), NVIDIA GeForce 970 (4GB), AMD RX 480 (8GB)
• Storage: 50 GB available space

If you are looking to run the game on 1080p60 FPS you should be fine with medium-end hardware. But coming to 4k ish resolutions you might need a pretty beefy PC. The recommended hardware mentioned above is tested with 1080p60 FPS. At this point in time, almost everyone knows that these system requirements should not be taken seriously, you will only know about the performance once it has been released and tested by the audience.

Let’s move onto making the game run better for ourselves.

Change Graphic Card Settings

Below are the settings for AMD and Nvidia graphics card users, apply these settings for the best performance.

For Nvidia Users

• Open up Nvidia’s Control Panel. Right-click on desktop > click Nvidia control panel
• Click Manage 3D Settings > Program Settings
• Find “COD MW”, you can manually add the game if it’s not in the list
• Now, make the following changes:

Monitor Tech: G-Sync (If available)
Maximum Pre-rendered frames: 2
Threaded optimization: On
Power Management: Prefer Maximum Performance
Texture Filtering – Quality:  Performance

For AMD Users

• Anti-Aliasing Mode: Use Application settings
• Anti-aliasing Method: Multisampling
• Morphological Filtering: Off
• Anisotropic Filtering Mode: Use application settings
• Texture Filtering Quality: Performance
• Surface Format Optimization: On
• Wait for V-sync: Off
• OpenGL Triple Buffering: Off
• Shader Cache: AMD optimized
• Tesselation Mode: Override application settings
• Maximum Tesselation Level: Off
• GPU Workload: Graphics
• Chill: Off
• Frame Rate Target Control: Disabled

These settings should be good enough for you. Try tweaking a bit with the priority of the application, this also tends to give a little FPS boost. I was able to get a constant 70-80 FPS.

Update Device Drivers

Whenever a new game makes it’s arrival, especially when it’s a AAA title, Nvidia is known for pushing their optimized updates for the best performance with their graphic cards. I am not sure about AMD because I’ve never used an AMD card. Below are the links for downloading the latest drivers.

• Nvidia Drivers Download
• AMD Drivers Download

Update: Nvidia has already released a full-fledged optimization update for this game. You can fire up Geforce experience and get the update right away.

Shut Down Memory Eating Apps

Open up the task manager and check your memory and disk usage. Close all applications (non-windows) that are eating your memory and using disk drive. If you are still stuttering with everything looking fine then you should probably wait for the hotfix update, which should be pushed out shortly.

I’d recommend you to shut down all memory-hogging applications such as Chrome.

Turn off Game Mode

Windows says that the Game mode helps in optimizing all-around windows processes, windows updates and other windows related stuff while running games if you have the game mode enabled. But this isn’t factually true, game bar has been known for causing issues related to FPS. So it’s better to turn it off if you are not using it, Nvidia’s Shadowplay is better for capturing game clips.

• Click Start > Settings > Gaming
• On the Game Bar, set “Record game clips, screenshots, and broadcast using Game bar” to off.
• Now head to the Captures tab set the “Record the background while I’m playing a game” to Off.
• Lastly, click on the Game Mode tab, and turn it off.

Tone Down Game Settings

The general rule of thumb for every game is if you are lagging it is always recommended to tone down the settings. Play around a little bit with the settings, turn down shadows and textures, this should help.

We will be posting the game settings in another article very soon.

Disable Discord in-game overlay

If you are using Discord like me, then I’d recommend you to change a few things. One such thing is, discord overlay, it’s not really something you need at all times. I use a two-monitor setup, so the overlay is useless for me. It is known for causing FPS related issues.

Disable Hardware Acceleration in Discord

• Open Discord
• Click on User Settings > Appearance
• Click on the Hardware Acceleration radio, this will turn it off.

Disable Discord in-game Overlay

• Open Discord
• Go to Overlay under App Settings
• Click on the “Enable in-game overlay”, this will turn it off.

Increase Game Priority

This is an old-school method of boosting FPS in certain games, this only affects the CPU relying Games.

• Press CTLR + Shift + ESC to open task manager
• Find Call of Duty and right-click > go to details
• Now right-click on the process’s .exe file and set priority to “high”.

This will prioritize your game over other windows applications and provide you with a little boost.

Update Windows

The recent couple updates were weird and broke a lot of games, to fix those issues, Windows has already pushed out hotfixes and you can download them right away. If you are running an older version of Windows, I’d recommend you to download the updated version.

There was also an update that caused windows to use up a lot of RAM for its search bar’s function called Cortana. This also has been fixed, you just have to update.

Verify Game Files

A broken download can have a lot of impact on gaming performance. Depending on the launcher you are using, find out the game-verify option. This is available for almost every game nowadays and can be used to fix various issues.

If you have purchased the game on steam, follow the instructions below to verify game files

• Open your Steam Library
• Right-click on Doom Eternal
• Click on Properties
• A Box will open, click on the Local Files tab
• Click “verify integrity of game files”

Turn off Overclocking Applications

If you’re facing the crashing issue with your game, then I’d recommend you to check for any overclocking related apps running. 9 out of 10 times, the problem is caused by MSI Afterburner or the Zotac Firestorm. Turning them off or toning down the overclocking settings should fix the problem.

Remove Temporary Files from Windows

Windows will gradually collect a lot of garbage files, these files are a collection of things that you download, Windows updates etc. You can safely delete them to free-up space on your hard drive.

To Remove these files

• Press Windows + R, type “%temp%” (without quotes) in the command box
• A file explorer window will pop up, showing you a collection of random files
• Press CTRL + A and delete all of them.

Sometimes, a few of the files might not get deleted because they might be in-use. Just restart your computer and this will be fixed.

The fixes mentioned above might not work for everyone as all of us have different hardware. The steam discussions page is full of people facing trouble, don’t worry these issues are generally fixed within a few hours of the release.

These were a few things that you can use for fixing troubles related to Doom Eternal 2020. Do comment below if these helped you out.