Xbox's DOOM: The Dark Ages Wins Digital Foundry's 'Graphics Of The Year' Award

Over the weekend, our Pure Xbox community GOTY article went up, discussing the biggest and best games of the year from a wholistic perspective. However, if it's just graphics we're talking about, the Digital Foundry team is best positioned to give us a verdict — and this weekend, the outlet has handed out its 'Graphics of the Year' award for 2025.

The team has highlighted 10 video games that impressed them graphically in 2025, with a few honourable mentions listed as well. In the end, Xbox & Bethesda's DOOM: The Dark Ages came out on top, with December Game Pass title Routine also making the list. Only the top-three are ordered; the other seven games are simply listed alphabetically.

Here's Digital Foundry's full list:

  1. DOOM: The Dark Ages
  2. Assassin's Creed Shadows
  3. Death Stranding 2: On The Beach

In terms of how DF determined that DOOM was the overall winner, the team attributed the award to "the game's ability to deliver a full ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) model at an incredibly performant level, enough to scale to the weaker Xbox Series S console without missing a frame-rate beat", amongst other pros.

You can have a look at the full list via the Digital Foundry link down below, and we'll also throw the video version of the list at the bottom of the article as well - although be warned, the video is more of a discussion at roughly an hour and a half long!

Do you think DOOM: The Dark Ages deserved this award? Talk to us about the id Software title down in the comments.

[source digitalfoundry.net]