If you've played the recent Doom open beta you most likely noticed how the advanced options were completely missing on PC, the framerate was capped, FOV couldn't be increased, and so forth. This combined with the gameplay being less like the arena shooters of old and more like Halo left a lot of PC players with plenty of anger to vent, and only one place to do so, Doom's beta page on Steam which ended up with around 8,000 negative reviews.
After seeing such an overwhelmingly poor response, Id and Bethesda quickly posted a message detailing all of the ways they plan to address PC issues, as well as what sort of graphical features we can expect to see in the release version.
To put it short, the launch version of Doom will not have a framerate cap on PC, will support ultra-wide 21:9 monitors, wider FOV, and various other options that allow you to tinker with your settings in order to find that optimal balance between pretty pictures and actually being able to play the game. Here's what the advanced settings will look like once Doom finally releases in May:
• Manually Lock Framerate (un-locked by default)
• Lights Quality
• Chromatic Aberration Toggle
• Shading Quality
• Post Process Quality
• Particles Quality
• Game F/X Quality
• Decal Quality
• Directional Occlusion
• Reflections Quality
• Depth of Field Toggle
• Decal / Texture Filtering
• Motion Blur Quality / Toggle
• Sharpening Amount
• Lens Flare Toggle
• Lens Dirt Toggle
• Texture Atlas Size
• Show Performance Metrics
• Resolution Scaling
• UI Opacity
• Film Grain
• Rendering Mode
• FOV Slider
• Simple Reticle
• Show First-person Hands Toggle
• Use Compute Shaders
• Vsync (support or triple buffering)
If you're interested in the actual technology behind the latest idTech 6 engine make sure to keep an eye on the Bethesda/Id blogs over the next couple of weeks as they are planning to give everyone an inside look at the engine's architecture, the rendering pipeline, and various other tech that's there to ensure Doom runs on as many machines as possible, as is tradition.
Doom is releasing on May 13, and if you're interested in my thoughts on the PC multiplayer, you can find my critique here.