Doom Eternal on Google Stadia Won't Be True 4K

Doom Eternal won't support true 4K on Google Stadia as was promised when it was announced for the platform a year ago.

Bethesda, the game's publisher, released new technical specifications for each platform that Doom Eternal is coming to (after leaking them earlier this week). Revealed is that the Google Stadia version of Doom Eternal "will run at 1080p @60 FPS on HD displays and up-sample to 2160p from 1800p @60 FPS on 4K displays."

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For it to be true 4K the game would have to run with a horizontal display resolution of approximately 4,000 pixels, usually 4096 x 2160. Instead, it will run at 3840 x 2160, which means it doesn't run at true 4K.

Upsampling the 2160p display resolution simply means that extra pixels are calculated to make it up to around 4K. However, this is an artificial means of hitting 4K and is sometimes criticised for not having as sharp an image as true 4K.

DOOM Eternal is coming to #Stadia.

4K with HDR 60fps #GoogleGDC19 https://t.co/6YBdOhHhNV — DOOM (@DOOM) March 19, 2019

When Google Stadia was announced at GDC on March 19, 2020, one of the big selling points that was pushed was that it would run Doom Eternal at 4K. Doom Eternal's co-director Marty Stratton even took to the stage at the time to say the game would run "true 4K." That's now been confirmed to not be the case, at least not at launch.

It's worth pointing out that the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro versions of Doom Eternal upsample in exactly the same way - though, those versions were not promised to run true 4K. The PC version's "Ultra-Nightmare" specs, the highest setting, also have 2160p at 60 fps.

When IGN went hands-on with Doom Eternal on Stadia back in June 2019, id Software said it hadn't tried demoing the first-person shooter with 4K at that point, but that it would be soon, and would announce details about the 4K support at a later date.

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With this latest news it seems that id Software hasn't been able to get a true 4K version of Doom Eternal working with Stadia yet. It's not the first developer that has run into this issue.

When Stadia launched in November 2019, controversy arose around Destiny 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2 for not supporting true 4K on Google's game streaming platform. Despite Google saying its launch games would. In response, Google said that it's down to developers to get their games running true 4K on Stadia.

Doom Eternal comes out for PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Google Stadia on March 20, 2020. A Nintendo Switch version will be released later in 2020. If you pre-order Doom Eternal then you'll get Doom 64 as a free bonus.

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Chris Priestman is a freelancer who writes news for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.

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