The performance in this game is unfortunately very lacking. This isn’t some crazy revelation that only I have come to, as anyone with more than a 60hz monitor can attest to having horrible frame rates, high frame times, and stuttering (especially at any amount of fighting). I don’t want this post to come off as another “Game bad, FatShark bad, remove locks” post. I want this to be genuine feedback regarding an issue that causes me to get frustrated while playing a game that I genuinely enjoy.
At every single setting set to low, ray tracing off, lower FOV, 1080p with DLSS on performance, and anything else that can be done to improve frame rates, I can sometimes average about 100fps in clear open areas, and consistently drop to 60 or below. And not even a smooth 60, a very stuttery and choppy sixty with dropped and hanging frames.
My PC specs are listed lower in the topic, and my computer should be perfectly powerful enough to handle the lowest possible settings at 144fps.
Attempted Solutions:
- Hours of troubleshooting graphical settings
- Tweaking settings in nvidia control panel
- Overclocking CPU, GPU, or both
- Downloading the steam beta for Darktide which was supposed to resolve some performance issues
- Disabling features like windows game bar, shadowplay, and similar tools
- Various suggestions from the community
- Verifying integrity of game files
- Changing worker thread count from 1 to 14 and everything in between
Nothing works. On different machines, or with different components, maybe these fixes will provide some improvement. But as it stands, there seems to be an issue of poor optimization in darktide. SOMETHING is causing this game to run like a sloth with broken legs. It’s almost certainly not GPU related. Countless posts about high end GPUs only sitting at 10-20% utilization can attest to that.
Everyone is seemingly in agreement that it’s something CPU related, and I would agree. In my testing, raising settings that only impact the GPU would actually result in no loss to performance, but changing anything relating to CPU in any way would MASSIVELY affect it. In addition, overclocking my GPU did essentially nothing while overclocking my CPU gave me very very slight returns. The fact that the worst issues almost always appear with hordes adds to this, given that hundreds of pawns all having their own AI and pathfinding probably isn’t fun for my computer to try to power through.
I usually don’t bring up the Vermintide II comparisons personally. Different game, different characters, different balance, etc etc. But this game runs on nearly the same engine as Vermintide II. Performance, all things considered, should be similar right? Why can I get a very stable 144fps on high settings in Vermintide, but I can barely scratch 100 in Darktide? Sure, the hordes are bigger in Darktide, textures are higher quality, lighting has likely gotten an overhaul, but none of that should have caused THIS level of performance degradation. The comparison of the two games really tells that FatShark DO know how to optimize well enough, but Darktide’s issues are being overlooked
Regardless, this is one of my biggest gripes with this game. I feel like I’m in the minority when I say that as the game stands, the single biggest thing making me not want to play is the performance issues. Before locks are removed, before new classes/subclasses are added, before we get balance sweeps to blessings and feats, I simply want the game to be optimized properly. It doesn’t have to be as good as Doom Eternal. I don’t need to be able to run 1440p, maxed out all settings, and RTX maxed out at 240hz. A stable 120 or more at the lowest settings possible sounds reasonable to me.
Platform:
Steam
PC Specifications:
RTX 3080
Ryzen 5800x
32Gb RAM - 3600mhz
Upload Console Log & darktide_launcher.log:
darktide_launcher.log (32.3 KB)
console-2023-05-24-20.04.18-a24833f4-3f18-431a-a8b4-f6fe2342da4f.log (16.3 MB)