At the Stadia conference at last year's GDC, id Software's Marty Stratton said "Doom Eternal is the ideal game to introduce the capabilities of a game streaming platform." If you want to prove to the world that you can stream games from the cloud, what better proof than 'Doom'?" he asked the audience, before stating that "Doom Eternal" would be able to "run at an uninterrupted 60 frames per second in true 4K resolution with HDR color."

This drew applause from the audience, but turned out not to be accurate. The Doom Eternal launch details page released yesterday lists PC system requirements and unlock times, but mixed in with the console information is the statement that "Stadia's Doom Eternal will run at 1080p @60 FPS on HD displays and at 4K displays It also states that it will upsample from 1800p @60 FPS to 2160p." In other words, it is not true 4K.

While 1800p is not a particularly common resolution, some developers choose it as a compromise between image quality and performance on consoles: Tripwire Interactive told Wccftech a few years ago that "Killing Floor 2" runs on Xbox One X, running at 1800p. And while that is a big step up from 1080p, it is not "true 4K."

This is another accusation against Stadia, but VentureBeat has an interesting overview of why it may not be fair to put the blame on Stadia. The bottom line is that "Doom Eternal" is a very taxing game: the "Ultra-Nightmare" setting at 4K/60fps requires an Intel Core i9-9900K CPU, 11GB RTX-2080 GPU, and 16GB RAM. Reducing the graphics options will keep it down somewhat, but there is no escaping the need for serious hardware if you want to run at this resolution. (Doom Eternal's system requirements page does not say which graphics settings the Stadia version will run at.)

Stadia's 4K situation has always been a bit ambiguous: as noted in our 2019 report, Stadia is streaming at 4K, 60 fps, but individual games may not run at that resolution: for example, Destiny 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2" are both upscaled from lower resolutions. However, "Doom Eternal" was specifically presented last year as a showcase for Stadia's 4K capabilities.

We have contacted Bethesda for more information and will update if we hear back.