Texture LoD rendering / pop-in Issues

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Performance Feedback
1

Issue Description (Required):

Let me preface by saying I know this isn’t a new issue, other players have mentioned this on/off for years.

I am experiencing significant Texture LoD pop-in / rendering issues with the textures of weapons, the environment, enemies, etc.

I’ve attached two images demonstrating the issue – most enemies look like this for 2-5 seconds after appearing.

The only solutions I have found are one of two things:

Disable DLSS and select Anti Aliasing “off” or “FXAA”. If TAA is selected, the problem immediately starts. Caveat to disabling DLSS is performance takes a significant hit and I haven’t been able to address the shimmering.

or

DLSS enabled, Texture Quality to “Medium” seems to help quite a bit ← my issue with this is there shouldn’t be an issue running the game with High Texture Quality settings.

Every other in-game graphical setting, I’ve tried. None have any impact on the LoD issue. Mesh Quality 1 vs 5 does affect textures at a distance, but not the underlying issue I’m describing.

Couple other things with respect to the gpu:

temps never exceed 70 degrees Celsius, usage is ~95%, interestingly I don’t think I’ve seen VRAM exceed 7GB, which leaves a 5GB overhead…?

Initially, I was leaning towards an issue with my drive but there’s no indication of it failing or overheating, and for the hell of it I pulled out an older WD_Black SN850 that’s significantly faster than the Intel 670p I’m using and there was no improvement.

If anyone has any tricks / solutions, I’d love to hear them.

Attempted Solutions (Optional):

Software:

  • Repeatedly reinstalled the game
  • Deleting nvidia cache, darktide cache, and %AppData%\Roaming\Fatshark\Darktide
  • Multiple DLSS Models (atm using K)
  • Every 50XX driver that’s been available
  • Drive health checks, virus scans
  • Tinkering with settings_common.ini (streaming_texture_pool_size, streaming_max_open_streams, streaming_buffer_size)

Hardware:

  • 3060ti, 5070, 5080 = irrespective of the card, the issue persists.
  • Intel 670p NVMe and WD_Black SN850 NVMe

Platform (Required):

PC - Steam

[PC] PC Specifications (Optional):

OS: Win 11
GPU: 5070
CPU: 5800X3D
Mem: 32GB DDR4
NVMe SSD
Avg Max FPS: 120
Avg Min FPS: 90

Upload Supporting Evidence (Optional):

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20250625225051_1.jpg
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4 Likes
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Yep same problem on a 12700k/RTX 4080. Been a problem for a while now. Fatshark really need to look at this as it severely hurts how the game looks

1 Like
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Same issue. Even mid run switching weapons will come up with blurry textures for a few seconds. I know Fatshark says to roll back driver to 566.36 but on 50 series that is not an option.

14900K 5090 32Gb DDR5 on Samsung 980 pros PSU is Dark Power 12

2 Likes
4

Same issue here, I’ve tried some of the older fixes on the forums like messing with the confing.ini and setting.ini, but that didn’t help.

I experience the issue on this system:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D PBO & -20 CO
RAM: 96GB DDR5 @ 6400 @ 32-38-38
GPU: ASUS TUF nVidia RTX 4090 24GB
On a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB with 2GB cache

But not on these system:
CPU: Intel i7-14700K Overclocked
RAM: 32GB DDR5 @ 6000 @ 32-38-38
GPU: MSI RTX 3080 GAMING TRIO X 10GB
On a Samsung 970 EVO 2TB with 2GB cache

CPU: Intel® Core i7-11700K
RAM: 32GB DDR4 @ 2666Mhz
GPU: Intel A770 Limited Edition 16GB
On a Crucial 2TB SATA SSD

Both nvidia systems use nvidia driver 566.36 (due to the constant issues with nvidia driver since december, that is the last known stable one)

This has been a long standing issue for me, ever since December 2023 if I remember correctly.
A lot of times I don’t notice it, but when a blurry crusher walks up, or you pull out a blurry shotgun or bolter… it looks pathetic.

Edit:
Turning textures to medium does seem to mitigate the issue very much, I do think it’s insane that I have to turn textures down on a 4090 with 24GB VRAM and 96GB DDR5 though, clearly a engine / configuration issue.

2 Likes
5

I also wanted to create such a thread because I have the same problem.
I haven’t seen this problem before the release of DLC with Arbites, there were also no such hight fps drops, when you get into the elite squad fps can drop to 6 frames
My specs:
RTX 3060 and 576.80 driver
32gb ram
Ryzen 5800x
Darktide on M2 samsung ssd

1 Like
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To my knowledge this issue is present since release.
Various textures and LODs being all over the place and do not upgrade properly

7

I am experiencing the same issue with textures set to high. No pop-in with medium settings.
5800x3d / 9070xt /32GB RAM; occurs on Windows and Linux/Bazzite

8

Same here, 5090 with a 14900kf. This has nothing to do with my (or any of your) hardware and everything to do with a weird antialiasing bug, I know because I’ve replaced my PC (which had a 4090, so it was still more than enough for this game) since I started having this issue and it remains.

9

OK. I set to Texture Quality to Medium and somehow it alleviates the pop in a lot.

Game engine itself can’t stream in the high textures fast enough…But hey that works. Another one to add to my Darktide notes.

2 Likes
10

Upon further testing I can confirm turning textures to medium fixes the issue.. thank you Autodesk Stingray for being such a great engine. 32gb of VRAM for nothing..

1 Like
11

Taking the opportunity of a new patch to bump this thread and to say that this is still broken / an issue with the current patch, and that setting to medium textures resolves it almost entirely.

12

Bump to this issue

13

Still an issue. Have to point out that I never experienced this problem with the game. I haven’t played it for about a year, so to my knowledge this problem became common between the autumn of 2024 and the autumn of 2025.

I have a GTX 4080. Needless to say, texture streaming issues shouldn’t be a thing.

14

Well, I fixed it thanks to a discussion with ChatGPT.

The CPU worker-threads the game suggests? Lower them by one. Yes, this sounds counter-intuitive because high-end GPUs cause texture streaming because they have to wait for the CPU, but regardless… it worked for me. In my case, I lowered 13 worker-threads to 12. Zero issues since.

ChatGPTs explanation below:

Darktide’s max suggested worker-threads setting (13, in my case) overshoots and assigns too many threads.
When that happens, the CPU ends up context-switching constantly, which slows down the very streaming tasks those threads are meant to accelerate.

By reducing the worker-thread count by exactly one, you eliminate the excess contention.
The CPU gets fewer, but consistently running threads, which means:

  • faster decompression of textures and meshes

  • fewer micro-stalls on the main thread

  • assets arrive on time, so pop-in drops dramatically

It’s not about “more threads = more speed.”
It’s about avoiding thread thrashing, which is what Darktide’s max suggested threads accidentally cause.

That’s why reducing one worker thread improves streaming instead of hurting it.

15

I’ve previously tried reducing the worker-threads, it’s never helped. The moment I put Texture Quality to “High”, the pop-ins start, regardless of worker-thread #

16

I’ve encountered the same problem after No Man’s Land update, worked fine before that

17

Same issue on a 4090, I9 14k ,nvme ssd and 64gb ram. I think it was fine on release, but after a couple of patches the issue started to pop up. And to this day i still have this problem. For some reason the textures load better on my steamdeck than my actual pc.

18

If i put my textures on Medium, slow texture loading fixes (i have 5070 so vram is not an issue)

19

Medium textures seem to be the answer. My current theory is it’s an issue with direct storage not being configured differently based on what texture setting you have so bigger textures with more mipmaps fills the dstorage queue faster than the game can handle

1 Like
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I wouldn’t be surprised if it was due to directstorage, i’ve never seen a game where DS is actually good for the game, it’s always complete opposite