Texture loading delay / pop-in ~1 second since hotfix 1.11.5 – RTX 4090 + Ultrawide

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Bugs
1

Issue Type (Required):

Visual

Issue Description (Required):

Hi,Since the hotfix 1.11.5 (released April 27 2026) I have a very noticeable texture streaming / pop-in issue that I did not have before.

Problem :
Textures (environment, weapons, enemies, props) take roughly 1 second to fully load when entering a new area, switching weapons or when something new appears on screen. It creates a very visible latency / pop-in effect.The texture of the big Mutant (the one that charges, grabs the player and violently shakes you) often fails to load completely. It stays extremely low-resolution and looks horrible. The game runs perfectly smooth otherwise (no FPS drop, no shader stutter).

My setup : GPU: RTX 4090
Resolution: 3440×1440 (ultrawide)
DLSS Quality + Frame Generation ON
Reflex ON
All other settings: Custom / High (Ray Tracing completely OFF)

What I already tried (everything): Deleted the entire %AppData%\Fatshark\DarkTide folder (full clean reset)
Verified game files + fresh driver install with DDU
All possible tweaks in user_settings.config (RT forced off, rtxgi_scale = 0, etc.)
Mesh streamer disabled + heavily increased budgets in settings_common.ini (streaming_texture_pool_size up to 3072)
Deleted shader_cache / shader_library files multiple times
Reset graphics settings in launcher
Portrait rendering OFF, VSync OFF, etc.

Nothing fixed it. The issue appeared exactly after the 1.11.5 hotfix (before that the game was perfectly fine on the same config).Note: The patch notes only mention this issue for Xbox. Nothing for PC.If any other 4090 / high-end NVIDIA users are experiencing the same thing since 1.11.5, please chime in.Thanks!

3

pretty distinct on the locked crates in expeditions. upgraded to a 5080 recently and them still take longer than usual to load to full detail level.

ever since the patch yes.

4

@SpiderMike thanks for the report. I shared this with the team and they asked if Anti-Virus software could potentially be delaying the streaming?

Also, could you please provide a video or screenshots of the issue? As this can help us see if the issue is with mesh or texture streaming.

Thanks!

5

hi

I’ve added exclusions in Windows Defender for the following:

  • The game installation folder:
    C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Warhammer 40,000 DARKTIDE

  • The AppData folder:
    %AppData%\Fatshark\DarkTide

  • The game executable:
    Darktide.exein the game folder

Unfortunately, this didn’t resolve the issue and didn’t even lead to any noticeable improvement. The texture loading delay / pop-in is still present.

1361210_20260430111636_1
1361210_20260430111636_11920×804 300 KB

1361210_20260430111548_1
1361210_20260430111548_11920×804 279 KB

The shield texture took almost 5 minutes to load.

6

Hi @SpiderMike

Thanks for the update and for the added info!

What I’ve learned from querying this with the development team is:

  • The patch note is a little misleading, as we’ve made no recent changes to texture streaming for either PC or Xbox, but it has been a known issue since 1.9.X updates when an investigation was started - though we’ve just started communicating it as a known issue.
  • Our developers suspect your streaming buffer is simply full, and that other things need to be unloaded before the shield was fully unloaded. Unfortunately, as more textures are added to the game this is likely to become more common. This has sparked an internal discussion about our potential future options to help alleviate this.

We did notice that the setting you changed from the .ini was not the correct one.

Instead of ‘streaming_texture_pool_size’, if you have the VRAM for it then try increasing ‘max_texture_pool_size’ instead.

Also, we appreciate that editing the ‘settings_common.ini’ file isn’t ideal! The team is looking at including the feedback streamer settings in ‘user_settings.config’ going forwards. Hopefully we can implement this change in the near future to make changing this a bit simpler.

7

I changed that in settings_common.ini :

feedback_streamer_settings = {
    feedback_buffer_size = 4
    max_age_out_tiles_per_frame = 8
    max_streaming_tiles_per_frame = 12
    max_texture_pool_size = 1536
    max_write_feedback_threshold = 0.009
    min_write_feedback_threshold = 0.005
    staging_buffer_size = 12
    threaded_streamer = true
    tile_age_out_time_ms = 2500
    tile_staging_buffer_size = 64
}

mesh_streamer_settings = {
    disable = false
    eviction_timeout = 5
    frame_time_budget = 1
    io_buffer_budget = 30720
    limit = 1500
}

streaming_buffer_size = 192
streaming_max_open_streams = 24
streaming_texture_pool_size = 1536

texture_streamer_settings = {
    streaming_buffer_size = 192
    streaming_texture_pool_size = 1536
}

and that in win32_settings.ini :

streaming_buffer_size = 192
streaming_texture_pool_size = 1536

then that :
feedback_streamer_settings = {
    feedback_buffer_size = 4
    max_age_out_tiles_per_frame = 8
    max_streaming_tiles_per_frame = 8      
    max_texture_pool_size = 1536
    max_write_feedback_threshold = 0.009
    min_write_feedback_threshold = 0.005
    staging_buffer_size = 12
    threaded_streamer = true
    tile_age_out_time_ms = 2000           
    tile_staging_buffer_size = 64
}

mesh_streamer_settings = {
    disable = false
    eviction_timeout = 5
    frame_time_budget = 1
    io_buffer_budget = 30720
    limit = 1500
}

streaming_buffer_size = 192
streaming_max_open_streams = 16            
streaming_texture_pool_size = 1536

texture_streamer_settings = {
    streaming_buffer_size = 192
    streaming_texture_pool_size = 1536
}

Nothing worked

This is a huge problem, it completely breaks the immersion. I won't be able to play for long like this, it's awful.
8

I’m running on a RTX 4090, so VRAM saturation shouldn’t realistically be an issue here, especially under normal gameplay conditions. More importantly, the problem appeared immediately after hotfix 1.11.5, and several other players are reporting the same behavior since then.

What’s particularly concerning is the severity of the issue. In some cases, textures (like the shield) can take several minutes to fully load, which goes far beyond occasional streaming delay and really points to something being broken in the loading pipeline or priority system.

At this point, it genuinely feels less like a hardware limitation and more like a regression introduced with the recent patch, or at least something that was significantly worsened by it. There are multiple recent reports on Reddit from high-end users (4080/4090 + NVMe) describing the exact same issue, including textures taking several seconds to load or appearing as very low resolution (‘PS2-like’) before resolving.

Could you please confirm if this has been tested internally on high-end GPUs (like a 4090), ideally at ultrawide resolutions? Because right now, this is severely impacting immersion and moment-to-moment gameplay.

I’d really appreciate a deeper investigation into this, as the current behavior doesn’t seem normal at all.

9

I’ve relayed this info to the team and it’s something we’ll need to dig deeper into.

It’s unlikley for VRAM saturation to be the issue. Perhaps streaming buffers saturation. We test on various setups (e.g. 4080, 4k), though I can’t say for 4090 UltraWide specifically. We’ll need to do some further testing.

As for other immediate checks -

Do you have any other Anti-Virus software (other than Windows Defender) running?

If you haven’t already done so, you could try adjusting some other settings for the feedback streamer e.g. enable defrag to see if anything helps.

There isn’t a default parameter for defrag, but inside the ‘feedback_streamer_settings’ container you can add:

defrag_enabled = true

Lastly, just as an fyi, If you do adjust further settings, please note changing ‘min_write_feedback_threshold’ and ‘max_write_feedback_threshold’ could potentially cause issues. So we recommend keeping these to default values:
min_write_feedback_threshold = 0.005
max_write_feedback_threshold = 0.009

10

Medium or High textures? If High have you tried if the issue persist with Medium textures?

Too low, set it back to default value or increase it 7000

That’s also way too low, keep the default value of 50

As for the mesh_streamer try this setting:

mesh_streamer_settings = {
disable = false
eviction_timeout = 45
frame_time_budget = 4
io_buffer_budget = 24576
limit = 6144

Okay so bear with me, how about Directstorage? Could that have some effect on the buffers saturation?

How about this relatively newly added line subresource_tlsf_allocator = true? Its supposed to handle textures and streaming

Could disabling both/one of those setting have any impact on the currently discussed issue?

11

Just to add, another recommendation from the developers I spoke with, would be to reset your .ini files back to default, and then try changing max_texture_pool_size

As we noticed the .ini configuration has been altered quite a bit.

e.g.

max_age_out_tiles_per_frame = 8
max_streaming_tiles_per_frame = 12

Both of which should be 64

You can delete your existing .ini files (or just copy out to be safer), then verify integrity of game files which should replace the .ini files with defaults:

https://support.fatshark.se/hc/en-us/articles/360021233534--PC-How-to-Verify-Integrity-of-Game-Files-via-Steam

We can’t guarantee it’ll solve the issue, but it would be best to have the baseline of default values before trying to debug.

12

I uninstalled the game and removed everything related to Darktide from my PC. I also did a clean install of the Nvidia drivers with DDU, but it didn’t change anything. The only thing that significantly improved the problem was lowering the textures to medium; the problem almost disappeared, thanks to SilentBob. Maybe someone should call a plumber; it sounds like a blocked pipe.