I’m not sure if anyone else is having this issue but I can have ray tracing reflections and lighting on low with DLSS and Frame Gen using my new RTX 4060 and be able to play a few games with it fine.
However, at some point, usually in the mid point of a mission, the performance just completely nosedives and I go from 80-100fps down to 20-40fps and need to disable it for the rest of the game. Even back in the hub if I reenable either type of RT the performance tanks back down to 20-40fps so I just have to leave it off. I can comfortably reenable at the start of the next play session.
Anyone else have this problem? Is it a known issue? I know I need to gather more info before doing a proper report but I thought I’d ask. Thanks
ray tracing isn’t worth using with this game. it improves virtually nothing because so much of the game is dark that it mostly serves as an awareness check on if you understand what it’s used for, because almost none of the game is lit in a way where it’s useful for anything but wasting processing.
Frame Generation takes away frames, ray tracing is useless in DT, DLSS is useful if you have a good pc. It’s possible that the system experience extensive load with your settings and feels the need to compensate by lowering performance to keep it from degrading. DT optimization at it’s best.
I’m not getting that. I’m doing more testing and recording as of last night and I’ve found that while in the hub something with the mastery and penance screens tanks the FPS to 20-50fps and lowers the CPU load from 60% to 45% while driving the GPU load from 70% up to 95%. Sometimes reloading the character fixes it but sometimes the game needs to be completely restarted to fix it. Last night there were no problems in mission but it has happened before. It did happen once last night by itself in the hub with no other interaction on my end. It’s not a problem with ray tracing but it is a symptom of something breaking in the game, which is why I’m trying to gather as much info on my end as possible, and why I’m asking if anyone else has this issue. Otherwise my game plays perfectly fine at 80-105fps with Ray tracing on
It’s a problem with how RT is implement in DT - the visual “enhancement” is infinitesimal at a cost of significant performance degradation.
Frame gen is not implemented properly in this game – sluggish, stuttering, input lag, it also disables frame limiter either in-game or NVCP.
It’s your rig, so you’re certainly welcome to enable/disable whatever you want, but I think you may struggle finding people who still run the game with these options (RT and Frame Gen) because of how poorly they’ve been integrated in the game.
I’ve already established that it’s not hardware performance related. The “performance degradation” isn’t a problem for me as I’m still >90fps most of the time. It’s not maxing out my CPU, RAM, or GPU during normal play. I’m not hitting my overheads here; it’s simply something bugging out that will rectify itself with a reload or a restart. That is unlikely to be hardware related. It’s not a problem with the GENERAL implementation of ray tracing. It’s a problem that is likely related to the alleged memory leak in the Masteries menu as that is a replicable trigger.
Open mastery or penance menu? Frames tank.
Turn off ray tracing? Frames max out for my monitor.
Turn RT back on? Frames through the floor.
Restart game with RT on? FPS is normal
That’s a bug that should be investigated and squished
so far raytracing and dlss quality keep my fps capped at 144fps / 2k in all but the thickest of hordes.
you can feel the software compensating for missing “real” fps even if the number says 144.
as for the visuals fidelity, its something you wont notice much at first but once getting used to it you wouldnt wanna miss it.
air lock- windows alone, seeing the distorted reflection alone makes me wanna lick that window
room details in puddles of blood etc. thats the reason i wasnt cheap on treating myself to a proper rig.
crashes i only had when i had visible portraits, the moment they were turned off (official advice here from fatshark) the crashes stopped almost completely, 2 in the last year.
couple patches ago especially hourglass map it was the other way around with stutter up until the first real room and what seemed the game loading every entity at once.
after a few seconds the knot burst and it was back to 144 fps, despite multiple file verifications and building shader cache from scratch
I was showing ~120 (with 180fps spikes) when I had frame rate gen enabled - it’s not accurate - reddit, steam, and these forums - there’s hundreds of posts mirroring what’s been said.
Your initial post made no mention of a “memory leak” - rather ray tracing, reflections, lighting, DLSS, and frame gen enabled.
If you think this is a bug, you should create a post in the appropriate section (bugs) and attach the applicable logs.
It is like not for minor patches. Whenever a big patch comes along it is usual steam verify, game launcher verify no success but actually having to re-install to stop the stutter of frames and audio but keep the FS folder in appdata folder.
After research I saw posts about resetting graphics settings in game launcher then in game re-setup your graphics options again. Going to give that a try next time.
Haven’t noticed any drops mid missions, however I sometimes get a similar drop when zoning to the mourning star.
I usually hop into meat grinder to reset it, never thought it might have to do with Raytracing. Might try turning that off and on again next time it happens.
Could be bound to zone changes.
Most missions have zones, usually broken down by elevators but sometimes they are just a single door and you can get weird clipping/lod when moving through it. Maybe make a note where on the map it happens next time?
I’d like to point out that you should try raising rt reflections to high. Since the difference in fps between low and high reflections is really small but the visual difference is noticeable.
I believe digital foundry has a video about it.
The gi setting has a big cost though.
Thanks, I’ll do that. The two times I noticed the big, mid-mission drops was after moving to a new area, even though those areas had the same or less intense lighting.
Thanks for bringing up that Digital Foundry fella because half way through he describes something very similar to what my OP was about so now I know it’s not just me
Ray tracing makes a massive improvement particularly in this game because of the large amount of overall dark and high contrast areas, where the fully dynamic secondary bounce light and shadow can be particularly impactful, and not to mention lots and lots of reflective surfaces creating a sense of volume with true physically correct reflections.
But yeah I’ve also been having issues with RT on since forever, essentially with any RT feature enabled the game will gradually become more and more CPU bottlenecked as you play, and eventually (usually after one game) my GPU utilization can go as low as 40% and often even lower, which on my RTX3070 would bring my FPS down to less than 30FPS, and the only way to fix it is to restart the game.
There’s clearly some major CPU scheduling issues that’s been left over in Darktide to this day, especially since even FatShark themselves don’t know how to determine the most effective CPU threads count in the settings, at least not with anything better than “just try all the numbers yourself and see which one works best”, so the fact that RT is pretty CPU intensive too (for BVH computation) is probably making this long standing bug even worse.
And it’s probably similar to how Helldivers 2, built with the same engine, also run into insane CPU bottleneck pretty often too.
That’s very interesting, especially because I’m having the opposite symptoms! My GPU utilisation goes through the roof while the CPU will wind down to 40%
You want your GPU utilization to be as close to 100% as possible, your GPU is the one who’s supposed to be doing most of the heavy lifting here with rendering each frame of a game. Remember the GPU is meant to be an accelerator for your CPU to offload graphics rendering to, because a GPU is astronomically more efficient at the type of computing used in rendering (and certain other things) than a CPU could ever be, while being completely useless for nearly everything else, by design.
What you do NOT want is that your GPU can’t be fully utilized because it has to wait for CPU to finish computing something for each frame before it can work on the frame, due to poor software design in a game.
