Welcome to the club. At least you got here after they announced they’re working with AMD.
Here’s some general advice to tide (haha) you over till then:
Go to gaming → graphics and set your global profile in adrenaline to default (you can still have the FSR upgrade toggles on).
Surface format optimization off, tessellation set to application settings. Darktide hates being messed with like that. This could be anecdotal bs because I made other changes but I feel like I stopped crashing so bad after changing that.
(Yours may look slightly different, I swapped to the minimal install which still has the FSR upgrade because I can just record through steam now)
If you’re on the full install instead of minimal, make sure Darktide is set to use the default profile. Because the shader cache builder is started after the game adrenaline tends to point to that .exe instead even if you change it back. I like to think this keeps them on the same settings just in case it doesn’t otherwise.
I also turn off the AMD overlay (somewhere in preferences) and hotkeys if on full install. Darktide hates most overlays other than Steam and this is no exception. You still get the FSR4 upgrade (FSR-ML? whatever) whether you see the notification or not.
In game settings:
My rule of thumb is pick a preset and stick with it but you can turn off some things you don’t like.
Personally I pick high preset in launcher, go in game and change the textures to medium (fixes texture pop-in for either GPU flavor), turn off lens effects, motion blur and depth of field. Restart the game after changing settings. Turning off screen space reflections also seems to help a bit with stutter. No other game acts like this but with Darktide RTXGI was even used to make the baked in lighting sooo…
I don’t bother with a framerate cap personally because it doesn’t have 144 as an option. The launch performance blog also implied the frame cap setting was made with reflex in mind so if you want one use vsync instead.
Some people will recommend turning off ReBAR/SAM but AMD benefits a lot from it in most other games. I recommend messing with direct storage instead.
In your user_settings.config, there’s an empty bracket for direct storage ~40 lines down. These are the default values:
direct_storage = {
enabled = true
disable_bypass_io = false
force_file_buffering = false
force_mapping_layer = false
}
Try either:
- Setting disable bypass io and force file buffering to
true (they’re intended to be used together)
- Setting enabled to
false
The shader cache builder is broken for every GPU flavor and most PSOs are generated during gameplay instead of during the launcher step. Every time you wipe your drivers you’ll be starting over.
When that happens I recommend doing a few laps of the mourningstar and then heading to the meat grinder to slap some enemies around and brute force some of the shader cache bits you’ll see more of in combat. Make sure to explode the flamers and toss some grenades or throw some warp abilities.
It won’t make it perfect but hopefully it will suck less. It should even out after a few games.
If you crash very hard there’s a good chance Windows will replace your GPU drivers with it’s own copy from Windows update. Make sure to pull your ethernet or disable your wifi when clearing/reinstalling your drivers.
I know you mentioned DDU but also give the AMD cleanup utility a shot
https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/faqs/GPU-601.html
It’s a pretty foolproof way to uninstall and even kicks Windows in and out of safe mode for you. Just make sure to do it properly:
Download your full driver install + AMD CU → go offline → clear your drivers → reinstall them → restart one more time → back online
I know that’s a lot but I really need to stress that no other game behaves this way.
Darktide just seems to break every other rule about games and computer hardware.
Hopefully the end of year post mentioned in the last hotfix includes some more details on fixes and stuff like radiance caching
Could be a good chance to change it away from Nvidia special sauce to Just follow the DXR spec.
