Ray Tracing & Massive & Unpredictable Performance Drops

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Bugs
1

Issue Type (Required):

Visual

Issue Description (Required):

Since I’ve upgraded to an RTX 4060 last week I’ve been trying ray tracing but have been encountering strange and sudden drops in performance which usually coincides with unusual demands of system resources. These often happen in the hub and seem to be mainly triggered by menus, but not always, and occasionally occur mid-mission. This is what I’ve recorded so far but I will try to record more in the future.

AMD B550-A Pro
Ryzen 5 5600X
Nvidia RTX4060
2x8GB Corsair Vengeance RAM

Usually the hub generates 85-105fps with around 60fps in menus with the following system resources:
CPU 71%
RAM 59%
GPU 76%

Played a mission to destroy incubation chambers. Went back to hub and used the masteries menu and FPS dropped to 20-55fps after closing menu. Coincides with an audio drop out for a fraction of a second shortly after moving about. CPU utilisation went down a fair amount but GPU usage hit the ceiling.
CPU 45%
RAM 61%
GPU 95%

Going to the chose operative menu fixed the problem. Entered the masteries menu again and reloading the operative didn’t fix the problem the second time. (see: console-2024-10-08-20.36.54-6f27f220-f4ce-4ba5-8185-2982b32240af)

Restarting the game entirely returned the behaviour to normal. Played a mission of banishing the daemon in the water purification system. Returned to the hub and slight drop in performance and audio drop out before returning to normal. Went to Hestia. Audio drop out after leaving menu followed by a drop to 20-55fps and the above low-CPU, high-GPU performance. (see: console-2024-10-08-21.49.48-31e3317f-e65d-448a-a3b4-6405495040bb)

Reloaded on to the hub from Rolling Steel with a massive FPS drop after a few seconds. Again, unusual system resource usage:
CPU 35%
RAM 73%
GPU rapidly bouncing between 89%-100%
(see: console-2024-10-11-22.39.51-3e578f0a-24bd-42ac-a2e6-591e576081e0)

Played the comms plex in the upper hive and had a mid-mission drop in frames after taking the lift down to the archives/scriptorum necessitating turning ray tracing off. I was in-mission so I couldn’t inspect the task manager performance.
(see: console-2024-10-11-23.16.06-108e0390-85ee-446a-9958-dd483cb89317)

Digital Foundry describes the exact same issue I have in a video from December 2022. I’ve time stamped the relevant section: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgz8hvLEjZo&t=750s

Thanks in advance and I’d be grateful for any help fixing this issue.

Steps to Reproduce (Required):

  1. Play mission with ray tracing on.
  2. Sometimes the performance gets so bad mid-mission that you have to turn ray tracing off to be able to play properly.

A. Use the Mastery or Penance menu with ray tracing on.
B. Sometimes the performance drops enormously and will not recover despite leaving the menu.

[PC] Do You Use Mods? (Optional):

No, I don’t use mods

Reproduction Rate (Required):

Often (<75%)

Platform (Required):

PC - Steam

[PC] Upload Console Log & darktide_launcher.log (Optional):

console-2024-10-11-22.39.51-3e578f0a-24bd-42ac-a2e6-591e576081e0.log (341 KB)
console-2024-10-08-20.36.54-6f27f220-f4ce-4ba5-8185-2982b32240af.log (522 KB)
console-2024-10-11-23.16.06-108e0390-85ee-446a-9958-dd483cb89317.log (475 KB)
console-2024-10-08-21.49.48-31e3317f-e65d-448a-a3b4-6405495040bb.log (377 KB)

2 Likes
2

Try changing the worker threads in the launcher to 6

There is something wrong with Ray Tracing in this game though that even FatShark cant figure out, even if you turn it off - it’s on, you have to change the .ini and change everything with “rt” to false. Though there are other ray tracing features like baked ddgi that you can try putting at false aswell.

1 Like
3

Thanks. I’ve had it set to 9 so far but I’ll give that a shot

4

Small update: I’ve tried RT again after the latest update which promised improved performance with the new full screen mode and I’ve updated the Nvidia driver. Somehow the performance is worse and doesn’t even reach 90FPS most of the time and still gets completely unplayable with low FPS and stuttering by the mid point of the cryonic rod mission so I turned it off again.

It’s a real shame because I went with the 4060 over an AMD GPU with more VRAM because of the advertised ray tracing performance

1 Like
5

the raytracing in this game doesn’t make enough of a difference to justify the performance drop. about a year ago, i took screenshots comparing max raytracing settings to having it off, and the difference was honestly negligible. since this is a first-person shooter, i think you benefit much more from better performance than using raytracing, which barely changes anything but lowers fps.

6

Not really the issue here because I’m trying to squash a bug or figure out what’s going wrong, not whether or not it’s worth it

1 Like
7

I disabled intel management interface and my fps is stabilized

9

What is that and where do you disable it?

I found a running service called “Intel(R) Management Engine WMI Provider Registration”, is that it?

10

Since I’m using an AMD CPU I don’t think that will help