Doom: The Dark Ages is unplayable on handheld gaming PCs at the moment but it's not because the hardware isn't good enough

The frequency of GPU driver updates for portable PCs really needs improving.

We’re only a few days away from the public launch of Doom: The Dark Ages, id Software’s newest entry in the 32-year-old franchise. Take a leaf from Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which used the id Tech 7 engine, the new Doom uses ray tracing all the time for global lighting, reflections, and shadows. As I discovered in my performance analysis, it’s not quite as demanding on your rig as you might expect, and even a handheld gaming PC can run the id Tech 8-powered shooter. Well, for a few seconds.

The above video has been captured on an Asus ROG Ally, set to its 30 W performance mode, with Doom: The Dark Ages configured to use the Low graphics preset, along with FSR Performance upscaling. As you can see, it manages to pull a consistent 30 fps…for nearly 40 seconds, before the drivers bailed out.

Admittedly, the game launched with a big warning about how the ROG Ally’s GPU drivers were old and not recommended for use with Doom: The Dark Ages, so it’s not like the above crash is unexpected.

However, the frustrating part of all of this isn’t the crash or the blurry, heavily upscaled graphics. It’s the fact that updating the GPU drivers for the ROG Ally is far harder than it needs to be. Unlike with AMD’s desktop and laptop graphics processors, where I can download the latest Adrenalin software, I’m stuck waiting for Asus to release better drivers for the ROG Ally.

This seems to be a perennial problem with any handheld gaming PC that uses an AMD Ryzen Z1 processor for CPU and GPU duties. Any other APU from AMD’s lineup can be updated via Adrenalin, but not the Z1s—they have to be done by the handheld PC’s vendor.

A screenshot from the PC version of Doom: The Dark Ages, using the Ultra quality preset — (Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)

Sure, the likes of the Ally, Steam Deck, and other portable PCs are really up for handling a fully ray-traced game, and I could only get 30 fps by use of FSR Performance, which makes everything so blurry that all the ray-traced goodies are somewhat lost.

That said, on a little 7-inch screen, it doesn’t look too bad, and I’d be happy to stomp around with my shield and shotgun for a quick blast. But until Asus decides to update the GPU drivers for the Ally, there’s no chance of that happening, and as more games become RT-only over the years, handheld vendors will need to do a better job at staying up-to-date with drivers.