INVESTIGATION: Poor Performance & Power Draw Issues Impacting AMD Radeon RX 9070

[FatsharkJulia]

We are aware of issues impacting players using the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, including low GPU power draw and substantial drops in performance.

In early April, we raised this issue with AMD, who are now conducting an internal investigation. We’re also exploring the issue on our side.

In the meantime, we would really appreciate it if those who are using the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and experiencing issues in Darktide could answer the questions below:

• Do you have SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading) enabled?
  • IF YES: Is there an improvement with it disabled?
• Which driver version are you using?
• Do these issues occur only in Darktide?
• Have you confirmed that all redundant GPU drivers have been uninstalled? This is especially important if the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is an upgrade and another GPU was previously installed in the same PC

Thank you for your support as we investigate this issue with AMD.

UPDATE 05/06

INVESTIGATION: Poor Performance & Power Draw Issues Impacting AMD Radeon RX 9070

Update from AMD: We’ve identified an issue when compiling RT pipelines and have a developed a work around. The issue is causing stutter after loading into an area for sometimes 15 seconds or more (depending on CPU/etc), like the Mourningstar hub or any of the training levels in the Psykhanium, like Basic Training. This issue would affect 6000-9000 series cards. Users who fully disable ray tracing should not be affected by the issue and can do that to avoid the core issue if they don’t mind not…

[murphIV]

I have an RX 9070 XT and it runs Darktide well but sometimes and in some maps there’s micro stuttering.

@FatsharkJulia

• Do you have SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading) enabled? Yes
• IF YES: Is there an improvement with it disabled? Haven’t tried
• Which driver version are you using? 25.4.1
• Do these issues occur only in Darktide? Yes
• Have you confirmed that all redundant GPU drivers have been uninstalled? This is especially important if the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is an upgrade and another GPU was previously installed in the same PC. Yes I used DDU

[TinmanX]

Hi Julia. Thanks for letting us know that the team is looking into this problem and taking it quite seriously, especially taking it up with AMD directly. There are plenty of new 9070/9070XT owners that would love to see this get resolved.

To answer your questions:

• Yes, SMT has been disabled in Bios, as well as manually configured using Process Lasso with some minor performance improvements (alongside fewer worker threads)
• Adrenaline driver version has ranged from release 25.3.1 to the current new optional 25.4.1. Same issues regardless of driver.
• Darktide is the only game I play that has these stutters and low power draw
• Completely removed previous drivers using DDU (restart in safemode etc)

If any other information is required I am happy to provide.

[analvore]

thanks for looking into this issue as the power draw issues have been really annoying.
. yes smt is enabled and disabling it does nothing
. im using driver version 25.4.1
. yes these issues only occur in darktide
. yes i used DDU to uninstall all previous drivers

[zeropaladn]

@FatsharkJulia

m

• SMT is enabled, I have not tried disabling it.
• Adrenalin 25.4.1
• Darktide is the only game I’m observing massive power draw drops and FPS dips. Other games do have some stutter (Helldivers 2, same engine!) but they’re not as drastic as Darktide.
• Yes, I’ve DDU’d the old Nvidia drivers before installing the AMD Adrenalin suite.

[native]

Thanks for the reply and effort in helping to fix it.

Regarding answers

• Do you have SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading) enabled?
  • IF YES: Is there an improvement with it disabled?
  • A: I tried disabling it in bios but they seem to have moved the option somewhere. Give me some time, will look up and then retry. Although with 5080 with same CPU there was no perf difference.
• Which driver version are you using?
• A: The latest one: 25.4.1
• Do these issues occur only in Darktide?
• A: Yes, I tried bunch of other games like Battlefield/Assassins Creed Shadows/GTA V enhanced and even space marine 2. None of them have this issue.
• Have you confirmed that all redundant GPU drivers have been uninstalled? This is especially important if the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is an upgrade and another GPU was previously installed in the same PC
• A: The windows install is fresh, there were no other drivers present.

[Tertio]

• SMT is enabled, no improvements when disabled,
• Driver version: 25.4.1,
• The main issue is the fluctuating power draw, which in turn causes noticeable dips. Happens in Darktide and Vermintide 2.
• Yes, clean Windows install on a new drive.

[BlackwinterStorm]

W Fatshark momen but it gives me this

[joljom]

Hi @FatsharkJulia, I’m so glad you acknowledge the issue and actively working on it with AMD.

• SMT on or off doesn;t change much
• latest Adrenaline 25.5.1
• Darktide is my most probelmatic game in terms of stuttering, so yes
• clean windows install with 9070xt, DDU every GPU driver update

I applied fixes from post, tomorrow will post how it looks like on stock settings: I fixed stutter and textures not loading in! (Texutre streaming config file change)

Game has heavy stutters every *teen seconds. I’m playing with RT and FSR4 quality on 3440x1440 screen, experience looks like this:

Edit: this is about 60s tour over Mourningstar lobby.

I see that the card can achieve very playable RT expeience, but these ocassional stutters kinda ruin it

Edit2: completely stock config file:

Although this tour had less big spikes the overall lows and avg are noticeably lower that the case with fixes.

Edit3: 8 Minutes of staring at the wall…

[native]

Check out the frame rate when I try to change cosmetics.

darktide cosmetic load stutter

[FrostedFlakes62]

Do you have SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading) enabled?
    Yes via Process Lasso, may have some minor improvement

Which driver version are you using?

latest: 25.5.1

Do these issues occur only in Darktide?

yes. no issues in Jedi Survivor, Expedition 33, or Cyberpunk

Have you confirmed that all redundant GPU drivers have been uninstalled? 

yes clean install of windows

Couple of things that seems to have really improved performance:

• Doing both of these fixes:
  I fixed stutter and textures not loading in! (Texutre streaming config file change)

• Enabling V-Sync: I have a freesync monitor, but framegen seems to not work at all until a enable v-sync for some reason

• Disable Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling

[Vizra]

Another success story for my streamer settings. Lets go.

Performance is still not great but i’ve found this really does help

[Vizra]

This issue isn’t just for the 9000 series of GPUs. I still have garbage performance on any driver past 23.11.1 (7900xtx)

I have done a bunch of tweaks to help, but it doesn’t entirely mitigate the issue.

Has this also been raised (The fact this is an AMD GPU issue)?

[DashHandsome]

I’m going to quote my other post to help others out

@DashHandsome

My setup to make it work even when it doesn’t say it is:

Set your global gaming experience in the AMD app to default, then toggle on FSR 4 so the profile is now set as custom. I manually added Darktide.exe to make sure it showed FSR4 toggled on. If you’ve changed the setting for darktide specifically to toggle FSR4 on it’s no longer following the global profile. Now any time I boot the game, even if the AMD app points to the shader cache builder and the AMD popup in the corner on startup doesn’t list FSR4, it’s still working.

And my comment here with examples for how you can tell if you need pictures or examples:

FSR4: It can work when it doesn't say it will and how Fatshark can fix it

My AMD app setup: Default settings with FSR4 on [image] Darktide set to the global profile [this is good] You do not want this [this is wrong] You can tell if FSR4 is working by looking for places where lines shimmer or objects smear. The worst case I’ve found of this is the particles in the psykanium against the metal grate in the center FSR3: [FSR3Smear] The particles smear against the center metal grate and the grates further out shimmer. The…

[FatsharkJulia]

Update from AMD:

We’ve identified an issue when compiling RT pipelines and have a developed a work around. The issue is causing stutter after loading into an area for sometimes 15 seconds or more (depending on CPU/etc), like the Mourningstar hub or any of the training levels in the Psykhanium, like Basic Training. This issue would affect 6000-9000 series cards. Users who fully disable ray tracing should not be affected by the issue and can do that to avoid the core issue if they don’t mind not using raytracing until a driver that contains the workaround is released.

[DashHandsome]

By any chance does this affect the RTGI light probes that are baked into the maps and are used when real time RT is off?

[Vizra]

Well… this doesn’t fix anything FFS…

I HAVE NEVER USED RAYTRACING AND MY GAME HAS BEEN BROKEN FOR YEARS.

AMD WHYYYYYYYYY

[DashHandsome]

Eh assuming my question is yes (and probably if it’s not too) this should hopefully get past the issue of the shader cache builder not creating PSOs

[zeropaladn]

https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/release-notes/RN-RAD-WIN-25-6-2.html

Fixed Issues and Improvements: Lower than expected performance may be observed while playing Warhammer 40,000: Darktide on Radeon™ RX 9070 series graphics products.

[joljom]

I got some results with Adrenaline 25.5.1 vs 25.6.2 running in Mourningstar on 9070xt max RT FSR4 quality 3440x1440p, 9800x3d:
25.5.1:

25.6.2:

Conclusion: seems like update has helped a bit