Some performance advice

[grasmann]

I tested a lot of stuff in the config and found that you can increase FPS dramatically if you can accept some loss in visual quality.
This involves turning off all dynamic shadows.
Which is not cool, I know, but if you want to play as smoothly as possible while the game still looks kinda decent this is the way.

So, the user_settings.config is located in

%appdata%\Fatshark\Darktide

What you wanna change is this:

local_lights_shadows_enabled = false

This turns off shadows from lightbulbs and such.

lod_object_multiplier = 0.001

EDIT:
This makes everything use low-poly meshes, which of course looks worse, but still kinda ok.
You can set this to anything apparently but the lower you go the more issues will show up here and there.
Some things don’t have proper lod meshes I guess or their size is too big or something so they won’t render at all. But it’s kinda rare.

lod_object_multiplier = 0.25

A good value if you can afford it with your hardware seems 0.25.
Values higher than 1 are possible too but will make performance worse.
Zero and below don’t work. If you set this to 0 many objects in the game won’t show at all.
EDIT

sun_shadows = false

This deactivates sun shadows.

volumetric_extrapolation_volumetric_shadows = false

This deactivates shadows on volumetric clouds

---

Additionally you can set the resolution of the only remaining shadows, the static sun shadows

static_sun_shadow_map_size = [
	1024
	1024
]

And then in theory you can turn up everything else to your satisfaction and still have the game look decent with acceptable framerate.

You have to make the config read-only or else static sun shadow resolution might be reset.

Rendering the shadows, I guess, produces a lot of draw calls that the CPU has to handle.
Most people probably have a CPU bottleneck in addition to the overall poor performance.
Also lowering mesh quality seems to free up some CPU usage.

I think it still looks pretty good.
Just doesn’t have dynamic shadows anymore.

It’s not in the screenshot but in this location I get up to 93 FPS.
With default low settings I think I have like 70 FPS.
With default medium settings I have like 60 FPS.

But I have a mixture of medium and low now.

[grasmann]

I made some more screenshots so you can see how that would look.
I have 80-90 FPS most of the time now.
But there are still some specific locations in various missions where it drops to 50 or something.
However most of the drops are sufficiently mitigated.
I could probably go up to 1440p.

My vanilla performance regularly would drop down to like 30 FPS in fights.

[hQo]

This config cannot be configured like before. With your settings in the .cfg the game would look like this But this is not possible anymore

[grasmann]

I think you also accidentally switched off static sun shadows
Or it wasn’t on to begin with for some reason

static_sun_shadows = true

That’s the bare minimum of shadowing so it doesn’t look completely derp
And the static sun shadow map should have a reasonable size

static_sun_shadow_map_size = [
	1024
	1024
]

or

static_sun_shadow_map_size = [
	512
	512
]

[hQo]

Nvm. Xgp version created a new directory and I was still editing the config for the old version.
And I’m OK with how the game looks in my Screenshot. At least I can play it with 100+ fps instead of 35

[grasmann]

You should try with the static sun shadows on though.
They are not very taxing on the system.
They’re basically baked into the map textures.
Lightmaps.
It makes a huge difference visually with almost no cost.

[trickster234]

Hi,

thanks for the Advice.
With this change my FPS almost never drops under 60 when Hordes appear.
Before it was in the 30s.

There are some Missing Objects here and there but I dont mind.

[NeoQuers]

friend, you helped a lot. My system is i5 11400F + 16gb ram+ rtx 3070

it was 70-130 fps on high

It became 100-150 Fps on high. You helped a lot with almost no loss in picture quality. The settings remained on high, I used only your CFG settings. I love you :* keep going and release tips like this.

[NeoQuers]

[NeoQuers]

YOOOO C: