Rainbow Telekine Shield/Dome Glitch on AMD: Everything I've Noticed and Suspected Cause

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Edit: If you’re coming to this post for help, try turning off anti-lag for darktide in your AMD software.

This is a condensed version of what I found out while troubleshooting in the topic on this in the bugs forum and reviewing my clips.

Previous troubleshooting: Trying all video settings, full reinstalls of the game, wiping my driver with the AMD cleanup utility, wiping it with DDU (offline while reinstalling to stop windows from updating the driver), BIOS update, chipset update, wiping all graphics caches and various combinations of all these steps.

The glitch: After playing 2-4 games (win or lose, any map as far as I can tell) Psyker’s telekine shield will become a rainbow mess that’s nearly impossible to see through and very hard to look at. No psyker shield in a game is required for this to happen. The glitch normally effects the entire shield but sometimes only effects some of it. If the partial glitch occurs then another game usually leads to a fully glitched shield. The shield glitch remains throughout a play session and though restarting the game fixes it, it will then reappear after a few more games. Clearing/regenerating shaders seems to have no effect. If the partial glitch happens in a game then it will stay consistent throughout that mission and not turn into the full shield glitch.

Whatever causes it happens between mission loading screens. The character select screen and loading into the psykanium seem to not have any effect on it. I’m unsure if there’s any difference between joining mid mission or joining from the mission prep screen make any difference. To test some of this I swapped between characters multiple times, doing a lap around the mourningstar with each one to additionally test if loading other player characters causes it. I was then glitch free in the psykanium but then the glitch appeared in my next mission.

Any AMD driver from the last year or so seems to cause it. Between here and Reddit I’ve seen it happen with the RX 5000 series, RX 6000 series and RX 7000 series GPUs. Changing settings in the AMD software doesn’t have an effect. Neither does having instant replay on or off. I suspected ReBAR/SAM but the RX 5000 series didn’t support it last I heard unless this changed. Either way it seems to be a driver bug. As far as I can tell this exclusively effects the telekine shield in either variation and nothing else in the game or any other game so my GPU isn’t failing.

My theory: This is a memory leak/overflow issue with the transparency effect used on the shield that doesn’t work right on AMD drivers, maybe due to other transparency effects that don’t unload properly. Even if this is not a memory leak, the main issue still seems to lie with the transparency effects. When the shield partially glitches the more transparent spots have the glitch pop up while the opaque blue wave effect on the shield isn’t affected unless the entire shield is covered. The effect becomes much more noticeable when the shield is running out of time and starts to blink in and out. The more transparent half of the blink is more glitchy and the more opaque blue half of the blink is easier to see through.

I will attach some clips of the glitch below, both full and partial glitches on the dome and shield, but will add more in a comment below to format some extra thoughts and observations I think are relevant.

EPILEPSY WARNING: Some of these clips have very intense color waving that are hard to look at. I don’t know if they’re that bad but better safe than sorry.

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I should mention @gpkgpk made a mod for me in the other thread that disabled the shield health update but it had no effect on the glitch. All it did was make the shields spawn with their low health blinking effect ( mod + code viewable here) but it did help me notice that the issue was with the transparency effects. All other gameplay with the glitch was unmodded as well as the clips I’ll post.

When the dome low health blink starts the shield fades out slightly and the glitch is more visible.
Slowed clips of normal and glitched for comparison:


The shield has the opposite effect, briefly flashing bright then fading. This follows the pattern of the transparency looking worse.
Comparison:


The despawning effect is also affected.
Slowed dome despawn (normal, partial, and full glitch):



Wall despawn:


And finally the weirder one which was harder to test. I didn’t want to bring shield into a public mission just for the sake of clipping or if it was glitched and detrimental to me helping my teammates.

When the dome is on a flat surface you can see a ring where it touches the ground. If it’s used near a ledge (or on top of a psykanium table) it fades out before it touches the ground.


However the shield summon and despawn both have a brief spherical effect that can be seen if not used on solid ground. The only part we need is the top half so the bottom half is faded off.


Note how when the raised shield despawns the effect reaches the ground.

The transparency effect used for the bottom half still properly cuts off the glitched dome. I’m unsure how the transparency is coded for the game but assuming they’re two different effects (transparent colors vs a full object/shader fade effect) then the issue could just be with the color fading. If they’re the same transparency effect then maybe the bottom half of the shield is at 100% transparency and the game can still read that properly but anything else other than that has issues.

It’s late so any questions or additional information needed from me will be responded to tomorrow. I’ve only seen a few details about this issue posted on the internet so hopefully all of the information I’ve given helps you find the problem.

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@DashHandsome, thanks for the detailed report! I’ve shared this with the development team for investigation. Much appreciated.

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Have seen this problem on my end as well.
Almost positive their shaders are borked for AMD, probably causing my crashing as well.

Is it a driver timeout crash during mission start/end loading screens? I previously “fixed” them by doing a normal reinstall and enabling memory integrity in windows security but that wasn’t working for others (and hurts performance a bit anyway). I then actually fixed it by doing a full driver uninstall with DDU and reinstalling it while offline. I’ve been mostly crash free for two weeks now but I did have two game crashes while loading into mission but that seemed to coincide with another person in squad crashing so I think there’s a separate issue that happens in loading screens. Plus they didn’t reoccur after another few missions like before.

I might make a guide on how to do it in performance feedback because there’s some extra windows settings to tweak to make it leave your drivers alone and you have to do things like download the full driver beforehand instead of using the autodetect because you’re doing it offline. A Discord friend was having the same issue and so far she seems crash free so I think I’ll be able to help others too.

exactly that
I can usually play one mission perfectly fine, but loading back into the morningstar or loading a new mission will cause a driver timeout.
And yes, I’ve used DDU in the past to cleanse my system of Darktide problems, only for them to creep back up over time.
Gets really tiresome.

Gotcha, I’ll probably make a step by step for everything I did. My friend also seems to be crash free on day 2 so I’m more confident it worked.

@FatsharkLev I can’t believe this but I think I may have found the actual issue. It’s the one thing I didn’t bother testing because it’s never been an issue until now. I turned off anti-lag for Darktide in the AMD software and I’ve gone 6 missions with no shield bug.

It took a bit to find something on how it actually worked but eventually found their announcement video for it 5 years ago that loosely explains how it slows down the CPU to keep pace with the GPU in GPU limited scenarios which I imagine might interfere with any loading/freeing of game resources (like hitting very high FPS in the loading screens perhaps?).

I was only clued into this after helping my friend fix her driver crashes then recommending she turn it on to help with frame gen lag. She hadn’t had the issue beforehand (and had never touched any of the AMD app settings) but her driver was only 2 months old previously.

Anti-lag is on by default in both the Quality and HYPR-RX driver setting presets but I know not everyone uses them which is why it’s been hard to find information on the bug. Let the devs know and if they can successfully recreate it it can end up on the known issue list in the patch notes so more people can find out how to fix it :slightly_smiling_face:

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Nice one! I’ve passed this information on to the team and we’ll check it out. Much appreciated!

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Nice. I have no idea how dependant on pc specs this issue might be but just in case, I have a 7900X + 7900XT + 32GB RAM and play on a 3440x1440@144 monitor and my friend has a 3800XT + 6800(non-x) + 32GB RAM and plays on a 1080p@75 monitor. We both play at mostly high settings minus things like motion blur and lens effects.

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Just upgraded to an AMD GPU, will try to disable anti-lag (would rather not but oh well) and see if it helps so thank you for the find I was thinking it was going to take longer to find a possible solution.

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In theory it’s supposed to just work but from what I saw when looking around it causes stuttering and other issues in some games. The stingray engine is neat but performance has a lot of oddities so it’s best to just leave AMD app stuff at default for Darktide. Besides, you can still leave it on for other games. Maybe we’ll see an official anti-lag 2 update for Darktide one day. Or maybe someone more tech savvy than us will make a modded fidelityfx dll that translates nvidia reflex to anti-lag 2.

It did take long since this has been an intermittent issue since the shield was added to the game and nobody on reddit or the forums had any idea. Luckily you happened to go AMD after I spent a month on and off troubleshooting. I’ve already had a few people confirm it worked to fix it too.

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BTW @DashHandsome , kudos to tracking down a fix for other users, I spread the word whenever it comes up; people are grateful for your work.

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