also try turn off gsync, I have 3080/5600x and turning off gsync made my game way smoother
Lower worker threads to something like 12 and see if there is any difference. Tbf it is laughable that hardware is which BETTER than the hardware I was thinking about upgrading to (3080) is giving this kind of frame rates deviations.
Yeah based on recommendations above I’m currently running on 8 with gsync off (the changing affinity to physical cores didn’t appear to have much of an effect on my rig). It’s maybe made a touch of difference overall, but I’ll re-benchmark a few missions tonight to get the actual numbers. It does seem to be some sort of deeper issue around series 3xxx cards and AMD processors though (from only anecdotal evidence reading through posts here and on reddit).
1 Like
Generally AMD CPUs tend to be clocked lower than Intel. I would expect that in a game with a lot of enemies the CPU clock speed might make a difference for min/max fps.
We all have seen the blog from one of the Darktide leaders. Their assumption seems to be PC gamers don’t care about performance, which frankly is a wrong assumption to make in my experience…It could be just a lazy excuse on their part.
OP, just wanted to pitch in that I have a very similar setup (3080, 5900X), and I’m getting nearly identical performance–yours should be like 5 to 10% better than mine. I’m going to fiddle with worker count and affinity, but I’ll be keeping an eye on this thread since you and I will likely have similar fixes.
Could be something weird about the AMD + 3080(TI) setup?
Possible fix? Another user with a similar setup said that disabling GeForce Overlay helped.
Nice, worth a go. I have the recording stuff turned off, but hadn’t disabled the whole overlay - will try that first 
I gave it a try and it seemed like it was baseline smoother. Sitting at about 80 to 100 in missions between hordes. I still saw stutters and dips, especially during hordes, but that’s nothing new.
Also, this is far from scientific or thoroughly tested on my part, but I also tried the Worker Count setting (currently at 10 but I’ll probably go with the folk wisdom of setting it to one per physical core), and it seems like my CPU was better utilized.
You’ve got 12 physical on your 5900X right? Try 8 as well to check how that feels.
Good call. I will when I have more time to play.
Interesting initial result - will run a series of tests over the evening but just wanted to let you know that a clean install of the newest nvidia drivers (527.37) appears to have had an impact.
Test setting
Rig: Ryzen 9 5950X 16 Core, 3080TI, 32GB RAM DDR4 3000, M.2 SSD
Aux settings: gsync off, nvidia geforce overlay disabled, nvidia drivers 527.37
Game settings: VFOV 65, 2560 x 1440, fullscreen, DLSS Automatic, RT off, AO Low, Fog Low, DoF off, Bloom off, Skin Sub on, blur off, all lens off, 12 ragdolls, anything else high, 8 worker threads
Map(s): Relay station TRS-150
02-12-2022, 18:09:37 Darktide.exe benchmark completed, 123789 frames rendered in 1167.093 s
Average framerate : 106.0 FPS
Minimum framerate : 55.9 FPS
Maximum framerate : 176.0 FPS
1% low framerate : 63.9 FPS
0.1% low framerate : 23.7 FPS
Note: I noticed it immediately on load in - was getting 100 looking down the hall rather than 80-90
What’d you use to run the benchmark?
You want to force the game to one of the two CCXs not every other logical processor. So first half or last half. I think one of the performance issues is the workload gets spread across both CCXs but the workload is accessing the same memory so you get cache thrashing. The same memory is being updated by work done on both CCXs so it’s constantly invalidating the cache and has to hit main memory. This is much worse on the 30 series, but still present on the 50 and 70 series.
For a 3900X/5900X/7900X you want 0xFFF or 0xFFF000
3950X/5950X/7950X you want 0xFFFF or 0xFFFF0000
You don’t need to restrict it from the hyperthreading cores, you just need to keep in mind they are not full cores and cannot handle the full load. I go with real + 1 for the worker thread count. So 7 or 9.
If someone with a 3900X, 3950X, 5900X, 5950X, 7900X or 7950X could test this and report back that would be great. If you don’t want to run a power shell script, it’s pretty easy to do with task manager, but annoying to do every time you want to play.
Open the launcher, but not the game. Open task manager and go to the details tab. find the launcher process, right click and select Set Affinity. Then uncheck the first half of the processors. Then launch the game from the launcher and the game process will inherit the settings.
I don’t know for sure this is what is going on with DT, but I know for a fact this happens with other CPU intensive games like 7 days to die. I have a 5600X in my gaming computer so I can’t test, but the game does run great on it.
Afterburner benchmark, with framerate min, framerate avg, framerate max, framerate 1% low and framerate 0.1% low - setup hotkey for start stop, started once loaded into map and stopped just before extraction.
My 5990X is 16 core physical, so you think I should be using 17 then? That seems high - I’ve been mainly using 8, 10 or 12 in testing.
In the past I tried 8 = 0x5555 and 12 = 0x555555 using (once launcher is opened):
Get-Process "Launcher" | Where-Object {$_.Path -like "*\Steam\*"} | ForEach-Object {$_.ProcessorAffinity=0x5555 ; Write-Output $_.Path}
Without much notable impact, is this the sort of thing you mean?
Test setting
Rig: Ryzen 9 5950X 16 Core, 3080TI, 32GB RAM DDR4 3000, M.2 SSD
Aux settings: gsync off, nvidia geforce overlay disabled, nvidia drivers 527.37, affinity off for first 16 cpus at launcher (and checked inherited)
Game settings: VFOV 65, 2560 x 1440, fullscreen, DLSS Automatic, RT off, AO Low, Fog Low, DoF off, Bloom off, Skin Sub on, blur off, all lens off, 12 ragdolls, anything else high, 12 worker threads
Map(s): Smelter
02-12-2022, 21:04:46 Darktide.exe benchmark completed, 131457 frames rendered in 1291.828 s
Average framerate : 101.7 FPS
Minimum framerate : 57.9 FPS
Maximum framerate : 157.6 FPS
1% low framerate : 62.2 FPS
0.1% low framerate : 31.0 FPS
For the 5950X, I am recommending using the mask 0xFFFF or 0xFFFF0000, not 5’s. The 5’s is a really old recommendation that hasn’t been relevant for many years. It helped back when hyper threading was new and the windows cpu scheduler was much dumber.
For the thread count, I mean n+1 of the real cores you’re allowing the game to run on. So in your case, 9. 0xFFFF or 0xFFFF0000 will restrict the game to run on the first 16, or last 16 cores, 8 of which are full fledged cores and the other 8 are hyper-threading one.
Thank you, will try that out tomorrow - and I appreciate the excellent descriptions / knowledge you’re providing.
1 Like
Alright - benchmark done on smelter
Test setting
Rig: Ryzen 9 5950X 16 Core, 3080TI, 32GB RAM DDR4 3000, M.2 SSD
Aux settings: gsync off, nvidia geforce overlay disabled, nvidia drivers 527.37
Game settings: VFOV 65, 2560 x 1440, fullscreen, DLSS Automatic, RT off, AO Low, Fog Low, DoF off, Bloom off, Skin Sub on, blur off, all lens off, 12 ragdolls, anything else high, 9 worker threads
Affinity Settings (confirmed inherited): Get-Process “Launcher” | Where-Object {$.Path -like “*\Steam*”} | ForEach-Object {$.ProcessorAffinity=0xFFFF ; Write-Output $_.Path}
Map(s): Smelter
03-12-2022, 13:57:21 Darktide.exe benchmark completed, 101622 frames rendered in 1123.625 s
Average framerate : 90.4 FPS
Minimum framerate : 48.2 FPS
Maximum framerate : 138.4 FPS
1% low framerate : 59.3 FPS
0.1% low framerate : 24.0 FPS
03-12-2022, 14:20:06 Darktide.exe benchmark completed, 75792 frames rendered in 821.735 s
Average framerate : 92.2 FPS
Minimum framerate : 17.3 FPS
Maximum framerate : 134.9 FPS
1% low framerate : 59.9 FPS
0.1% low framerate : 16.6 FPS
Not was I was expecting but I appreciate your testing. Looks like the improvements to the 3000 series and the 5000 series is way more than I thought. Do you mind running it one more time with 0xFFFF0000 to get the second half?
Only other thing I can think of is memory speeds. I know Ryzen likes fast memory. However I underclocked my memory from 3600 to 2400 and only dropped about 10% FPS. I would not expect you to get much of a boost moving to 3600 from 3000 and I don’t think the price would be worth it.
Intel is actually effected by memory speeds far more than ryzen cpus are now days especially since the ryzen cpus now have 8 core ccds.