Extreme and Horrifying Issues with running Darktide/Performancee

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Performance Feedback
1

Issue Type (Required):

Performance

Issue Description (Required):

I am facing EXTREME stutters and performance drops in Darktide, I recently upgrade from a Nvidia RTX 3070 to a AMD XT9070. I have spent over 60 hours alone researching ways to improve my performance, watched dozens of videos, I even spent legit 8 hours straight editing every setting individually to get this game to work PROPERLY. I took a hiatus before Arbites and have returned recently. The game is simply unplayable in every sense of the word despite my system far exceeding the bare minimums. Given the amount of time I’ve spent searching these forums, videos I’ve watched and tinkering I’ve done I need someone here from Fatshark to honor my time and purchase to provide a system settings detail given my system specs below.

Device Name DESKTOP-1KLQDT8
Processor Intel(R) Core™ i7-10700F CPU @ 2.90GHz 2.90 GHz
Installed RAM 32.0 GB
Storage 954 GB SSD INTEL SSDPEKNW010T9, 932 GB HDD WDC WD10EZEX-00BN5A0, 112 GB SSD KINGSTON SV300S37A120G
Graphics Card AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT (16 GB)
Device ID 7907C41A-DCA4-4100-9BA2-361D98FE0FC1
Product ID 00326-10000-00000-AA432
System Type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

I have 800 hours in Darktide and I want to push Havoc but my ability to play is undermined by your games lack of stability. I run WoW, Starfield, Total War Warhammer 3 ALL at High to Max setting with little to no FPS drops or stutters. This is a darktide issue I need resolved.

Thanks

[PC] Do You Use Mods? (Optional):

Yes, and I’ve tried disabling them

Reproduction Rate (Required):

Constant (100%)

Platform (Required):

PC - Steam

2

My rig has a 9070 XT and a 5800X3D, 32 GB RAM, Darktide is installed on my Samsung 990 Pro M.2 Drive.

Is Darktide installed on your SSD or the HDD since you mention both?

Have you tried deleting the Darktide folder in %appdata%\Fatshark since you changed your GPU? I had to do this when I upgraded my GPU from 6700 XT to my 9070 XT.

What resolution are you running the game at? With a 9070 XT, minimum resolution you should be running is 1440p.

Are you using FSR? I know some people get weird about the mere mention of FSR and want to run “native”, but you might need to bite the bullet and enable it for this game.

I run the game at 1440p, FSR on Balanced, most settings are High. I disabled stuff like Motion Blur, Depth of Field, Lens Flare and Bloom because I find them annoying and unecessary. Worker Threads is set to 8 since my CPU has 8 cores. I don’t have anything else running other than normal background Windows processes when I play Darktide. I don’t have Frame Generation enabled since there’s an issue with that right now and causes the game to crash.

My average FPS with above settings is 120.

3

to take advantage of the 9070 XT you want to use FSR and upscaling, if you are in windows, go into adrenalin and set the graphics for darktide to HYPR-RX and follow what it tells you to get it activated, lower your in game resolution to one step below your native resolution and see the AI magic

4

If it’s any consolation Darktide is the exception to everything performing well on your new setup. My 9070XT has been a peach and even handles some mild undervolting no problem.

I recommend setting textures to medium (high causes pop-in for anyone with any card) and setting lowering global illumination if you’re not using RT (the baked lighting probes were made with RTX cards, not sure if that’s relevant or not). Screen space reflections also always seemed oddly performance heavy so I turn those off personally.

Disabling the mesh streamer can help with stutter at the cost of player portraits and cosmetic icons loading in slower. Go to Warhammer 40,000 DARKTIDE/bundle/application_settings/settings_common.ini and find this block:

mesh_streamer_settings = {
	disable = false
	eviction_timeout = 5
	frame_time_budget = 1
	io_buffer_budget = 10240
	limit = 700
}

Change disable = false to disable = true and then save the file. This file will get reset every time the game updates. It also may not work as well if you’re doing any other .ini tweak shenanigans so beware.

Don’t do this actually, FSR4 is enabled by default so you don’t have to worry about that and Darktide really hates being messed with by outside programs. Plus HYPR-RX enables anti-lag which at least on 6000/7000 cards is what causes the psyker shields to turn into rainbow mush.

I recommend leaving Darktide on the default profile in Adrenaline due to how the game bounces between different .exe’s. Adrenaline will more often than not point to the wrong .exe.

DTAdrenaline
DTAdrenaline785×202 49 KB

I’ve seen it point to everything from the launcher, gpudetection, crash handler, and shader cache builder. This isn’t really an issue with Adrenaline itself but rather no other game bounces between different exes like Darktide does. Like the launcher runs gpudetection multiple times to find your GPU and then check its features.

What makes this worse (I think) is how if you check your launcher log it shows the launcher starting darktide.exe but it then runs the shader cache builder afterwards. This is probably why Nvidia users running the DLSS updater also get caught on the launcher. NO OTHER GAME DOES STUFF LIKE THIS.

One side effect of the game confusing adrenaline is if you’re using the overlay to see if FSR4 is working it won’t show it properly because it has the wrong exe. Darktide also doesn’t update its menus to show which version is running like other games.

Despite this it it working. Go to the psykanium and you can see whether or not the ambient particles smear across the floor grate.

FSR3Smear
FSR3Smear1236×617 112 KB

FSR4NoSmear
FSR4NoSmear1446×579 125 KB

it’s working and you can tell

One last issue that effects everyone but is just one more issue for AMD users: The shader cache builder is broken and doesn’t build all PSOs. You’ll have some shader stutter here and there. You can help it a bit by going to the psykanium and spending 30 seconds turning enemies into paste, tossing grenades, and making the flamer/tox flamer tanks blow up. It will get better over time but there’s not much to do besides tough it out for a few games.

5

That last point, i have to do that every single time i load up the game just so it can load into missions at a reasonable pace and not experience mid-mission stutters (will still experience them regardless but at a much lesser rate)

6

What makes this worse (I think) is how if you check your launcher log it shows the launcher starting darktide.exe but it then runs the shader cache builder afterwards. This is probably why Nvidia users running the DLSS updater also get caught on the launcher. NO OTHER GAME DOES STUFF LIKE THIS.

What the heck!

image
image893×631 110 KB

Seriously the more I read from you guys. Who actually took deep dives in to this cluster fudge of code pile.

How the hell they gonna fix this?
Can they transfer the game to a different engine?

I mean as far I know Stingray is no longer getting any support from Autodesk since 2018.

7

Stingray was originally owned by Fatshark before it was bought by Autodesk. Autodesk discontinued it and now Fatshark owns the engine again.

That’s…no. That’s making an entire new game.

8

I had horrible performance issues on my 5070ti system, texture pop in, textures not loading at all, lag spikes when a horde spawns. I probably read every single thread about performance at least a few times and in the end they were all at best leading in the right direction, but none could really fix my issues. The only thing that did anything noticeable was this thread:

So I linked the post and both config files to deepseek and asked for an explanation to what each value does and what I should change and why. Changed some values, tried it, gave feedback, changed some again. End result is, issue is literally gone. I don’t have mesh streamer disabled and I am using all high settings (including textures), 1440p ultrawide, dlss performance. I get like 120+ fps without fg during horde events or whatever. 1% lows are like 90.

9

What did you end up with your settings?

10

Interesting, Claude, OpenAI and Chatgpt insisted on disabling it. But that might be because of the line of inquiry i went with. Past that i’m actually quite satisfied with the AI results, had stuff explained to me, what it does and the reason why should i change it and so on!

This solved the issues with textures and made the game considerably smoother for me on nvidia 3070 GPU:

triangles_per_job = 2048
max_age_out_tiles_per_frame = 16
max_streaming_tiles_per_frame = 16
tile_age_out_time_ms = 7000
tile_staging_buffer_size = 16

mesh_streamer_settings = disable = true

streaming_buffer_size = 128
streaming_texture_pool_size = 600

Had almost no success when it comes to increasing my FPS, but then again my FPS issues are fairly minor at worst and my biggest gripe with DT was the mess happening within the 61-119 FPS range!

Btw @Vizra

11

Dash i saw this post and i was wondering,

is it possible that because of this .exe stuff the AMD ULPS might be engaging while Darktide is playing?

12

I haven’t seen people mention that since crossfire was a thing. I doubt it but I guess it’s plausible?

Feel free to give it a shot but I did a quick search to see if it’s still being shared as a magic “performance hack” or whatever and saw a few mentions of disabling it causing modern Windows to crash.

For Darktide specifically I think a lot of tweaks that involve repeatedly closing and opening the game to test are a placebo cause of this:

The mourningstar isn’t a good performance benchmark because it’s a networked area with a bunch of players connecting/disconnecting. Ideally you play a game or two to see the effect your change has had in real gameplay but in the process you’re slowly building up all those missed shaders.

Also cause I gotta be that person-

Because they’re all trained on data from the internet (Reddit especially). You get out what you put in.

13

F that, my last AMD GPU was ATI 9800 waaay back in the day :laughing:

Long story short i asked about this on our company chat and one of the people working on PS5 port sent me back the quoted post from Munchmatoast with

Hmm, turn off hags and try disabling ULPS and maybe MPO as well

Yeah i think the fella in question was talking about going to menu solving his power draw issues during a mission