[Info Gathering] Are you using an NVIDIA graphics driver version 600 or above?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
1

I’m currently gathering more information. Some players have reported that driver versions 600 and above tend to cause severe frame drops when playing Darktide.If you’re experiencing severe stuttering or frame drops while using the latest version of the graphics driver, please leave a comment below.

2

Current version I’m using is 591.74 (rel. Jan 5, 2026). Haven’t opened the nvidia app in a while and saw no reason to.

3

I’m on 610.88. I haven’t noticed things being worse than the typical tide game frame drop experience (which I’ve experienced in VT2 as well). I can post some captures from CapFrame X if it helps.

4

I have 591, in all my time playing games I’ve had more issues installing new drivers than keeping the old versions, the framerate upgrades on the new versions are almost non-existant, but they can often introduce new issues which take days to resolve

5

I’m using 616.56 and I have consistent frame drops when there’s fire and tox gas

6

I installed version 616.56 yesterday and got desktop flickering. Nvidia has really gone downhill with their drivers lately. I had to roll back to 610.88. As for Darktide, I bought Lossless Scaling on Steam, and now I’m getting 120 FPS with frame gen without any lag.

7

I have noticed I am getting really bad frame drops when around fire/psyker fire with the updated drivers. I reverted back to an old driver let’s see if it helps

8

Running 610.62

I notice sever frame drops in havocs when enemies get multi-color highlights.

9

Be sure to fully clear your shader cache…as in the full method that requires several reboots. Then turn the cache onto unlimited too. It helped my frame rate a lot.

10

After updating to this version, I experienced severe frame drops—the frame rate dropped to as low as single digits.

11

With version 610.88, I actually ran into more issues and had to roll back even further. My screen’s contrast and brightness are now abnormal—the entire display has a kind of overexposed look to it.

12

Does this work?

13

on what version?

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How does one do this?

15

Google will give you these exact steps which I followed. Please excuse a poor copy pasta from the googles! Here:

To fully clear your NVIDIA shader cache, you need to disable the cache, delete the hidden cache files manually, use Windows Disk Cleanup, and then re-enable the setting. [1, 2]

Disable Shader Cache Temporarily

  1. Right-click your desktop and open the NVIDIA Control Panel (on Windows 11, click “Show more options” first).
  2. Go to Manage 3D Settings and select the Global Settings tab.
  3. Find Shader Cache Size, change it to Disabled, and click Apply at the bottom right.
  4. Restart your computer. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Delete Cache Files Manually

  1. Press Windows Key + R to open the Run dialog box.
  2. Type %localappdata% and press Enter.
  3. Open the NVIDIA folder.
  4. Open the DXCache and GLCache folders and delete all files inside them (skip any files currently in use by active programs).
  5. Go back to %localappdata%, look for NVIDIA Corporation, and empty the NV_Cache folder if it exists.
  6. Check %localappdata%Low\NVIDIA or %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\NVIDIA for any additional DXCache folders and clear them. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]

Run Disk Cleanup for DirectX Shaders

  1. Press the Windows Start key, type Disk Cleanup, and open the tool.
  2. Select your C: drive and click OK.
  3. Click Clean up system files and select your C: drive again.
  4. Uncheck everything in the list except DirectX Shader Cache, then click OK and Delete Files. [1, 2, 3]

Re-Enable Shader Cache

  1. Open the NVIDIA Control Panel again.
  2. Navigate to Manage 3D Settings > Global Settings > Shader Cache Size.
  3. Set it back to Driver Default or pick a size like 10 GB or 100 GB, then click Apply.
  4. Restart your PC one last time
16

Please let us know if doing this helps you as it genuinely gave me a much more stable game. I have set my cache to unlimited so hopefully it will never need doing again

17

616.56 released 2 days ago iirc, no changes noticed, same as with the previous version.

18

I haven’t played enough to give solid feedback. I do recall there was a period though about a year ago where one of the driver updates completely destroyed my FPS in the mourningstar. I reverted it back to an old driver and was using it for a very long time before I decided to update and had no issues. It is very possible its a driver issue

19

The post above from @MadMartigan reminds me that about a couple of months ago I ran Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) when another game I play was suddenly showing horrific 1% lows that made the game unplayable due to constant microstutters.

Running DDU not only fixed the game’s performance, it was running better than it ever had. My other games (including Darktide) also were running more stable. Apparently something had built up or gotten misconfigured after who knows how many driver updates that was causing problems.

DDU removes all the shader caches, registry edits, driver config, etc. Completely cleans it all. I’ll probably start running this periodically (like a couple times a year) as basic maintenance.

20

It appears to have had no effect at all so far. At least none that’ve noticed. Except perhaps now blurry textures take even longer to resolve. Like, loading into the mourningstar it takes up to 5 minutes before the blurry textures resolve.