Unplayable stutters on AMD

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Performance Feedback
1

Issue Type (Required):

Performance

Issue Description (Required):

AMD haven’t had a proper stable driver without either corruption, unplayable stutters or driver timeouts since version 23.11.1 (which had texture corruption issues) and at this point AMD is closing to ONE YEAR of broken drivers for Darktide.

PC specs are: 5800X3D, 6800XT, dual channel 16GB memory, 1080P resolution

The game looks terrible,runs terrible and I’ve reached my wit’s end from these horrible stutters. Its wild that with so many negative reviews over performance nothing was done about this.

Currently on driver 24.8.1 and I have had a migraine from 2 rounds of auric maelstorm. Darktide is the ONLY GAME that behaves like this on this driver.

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

Yes, and I’ve tried disabling them

Reproduction Rate (Required):

Constant (100%)

Platform (Required):

Steam (PC)

4 Likes
2

I started getting better results on my RX 6600 with 24.7.1. But yes, this is the only game I’ve ever had real AMD driver problems with.

3

I had the same constant stuttering, I got so frustrated that I eventually bought an RTX, lo and behold, stuttering is gone. This is some serious bullSheit Fatshark. Not to mention at one point in 2023 you couldn’t play Darktide at all on any AMD machine with Windows 10 for about a month, because of some bad spaghetti code. (you can look it up on bugs subforum if you are interested). And you guessed it, I switched to Windows 11, because this was the only solution for a whole month. Seriously, Fatshark, if that’s not lousy coding then I don’t know what is.

4

If the stutters are when you are turning your camera left or right, I had it resolved and it returned after the Unlocked and Loaded update. Medium-High settings, 147fps average over 100 minutes, Ryzen 1800X + 6900XT + 16GB RAM. No noticable drops.

Resolved it (probably until the next update) by, in Darktide:

  • Disabling FSR frame gen and upscaling, Vsync
  • Run in Borderless Fullscreen
    Ray-tracing off of course.

Changing the following settings in Adrenaline (24.10.27.01) specifically for Darktide:

  • Freesync > AMD optimised (Freesync also enabled on the monitor)
  • Fluid Motion Frames > On
  • Anti-Lag > On
  • Advanced Sync > On
  • Advanced, Anti-Aliasing > Use application settings
  • Advanced, Tessellation Mode > AMD optimised

I don’t know exactly which setting did it, but it was related to Freesync last time, so maybe something that would conflict with it?

5

I have since upgraded to 32 GB RAM and a 7800X3D, completely fresh installation of Windows 10. Happy to report that it solves nothing.

1 Like
6

You turned on fluid motion frames which is driver level frame generation. This happens after everything is already rendered and is being sent to the monitor so you’ve (roughly) “doubled” your FPS but any FPS counters like the Steam one or third party overlays will still report the original FPS. Check the FPS in the steam overlay and then check what the AMD app is reporting, it won’t be the same.

Also because AFMF applies to the entire screen, you might get ghosting on UI elements like the crosshair. One benefit of the game having frame gen built in now is it can be make to ignore the UI (Mostly, lens effects still messed with it but it should be fixed now).

By the way, leave anti-lag off. That’s what causes the Psyker shield to turn into a rainbow mess you can’t see through. Yes that sounds like nonsense but anti-lag is supposed to throttle the CPU when GPU limited so I suspect it messes with loading assets somehow.

I’m also going to point everyone here to Vizra’s forum post where he was messing with the texture streaming settings buried in a config file and was able to improve his performance on AMD setups. It seems to help me to (even without turning SAM off like recommended) so I’m helping my less tech inclined friends change this stuff to test it too.

7

Hey Dash,

Wondering if you still get FPS drops when hordes load in? My gameplay seems to be fine, its just when hordes spawn sometime my FPS will TANK… Wondering which settings you are using, and what config changes you are running. Also are you on a 7000 series AMD card?

Thanks

8

Win 11
7900X CPU
7900XT GPU
32gb RAM 6000mhz
Gigabyte B650I + Most recent bios
AMD driver 12.10.1 (haven’t updated to 12.12.1 yet)

18 threads in the launcher
3440x1440@144hz monitor, set native res in game
118 FOV
Vync off
No frame cap
FSR Quality + Frame gen
Sharpness 0.35
RT off
High textures
2.5 Mesh quality
High ambient occlusion
High light quality
Medium fog
Depth of field off (yuck)
High Global illumination
Bloom off
Subsurface scattering on
Motion blur off (double yuck)
Medium reflections
Lens quality off
Lens flares sun only
1.0 scatter density
50 ragdolls
20 weapon decals
35 blood decals
25 decal lifetime
blood decals, gibbing, wounds, and ragdoll interaction all on.

AMD app: Darktide set to the default gaming profile + freesync set on instead of AMD optimized. Instant replay enabled for clipping things, using my second SSD for buffer/storage. SAM/ReBAR still enabled due to getting crashing when I tried turning it off a few months ago.

My FPS does go down during hordes but there’s no crazy stutter and I don’t really notice it unless I’m watching my FPS counter. Generally my FPS never goes below 100 besides loading screens and some menus. I suspect some of that could be frame gen not working like how it didn’t with lens effects.

Also since I mentioned driver version, make sure to hit the factory reset option when updating your GPU driver to make sure the old one is gone. Just back up your AMD settings beforehand.

Just so everyone makes sure to change the right one when messing with it, there are two extra Darktide related entries in the AMD app that don’t track or effect game performance as far as I can tell.

image
image389×322 27 KB

The first one points to the main Darktide.exe in the Binaries folder and the second one to the darktide_shader_cache_builder.exe in the shader cache folder.

The actual one you want is titled Warhammer 40,000: Darktide (disregard average fps, that was while scrolling the settings menu)

image
image185×321 14.6 KB

This one actually points to the GPUDetection.exe in the launcher folder.

9

I’ve noticed this. I’ve also noticed that sometimes the game picks up the Darktide.exe propperly.

Wonder if that has anything to do with performance?

Are you running any texture streaming / mesh streaming settings at all?

10

Mesh streamer left on while I fiddle with these to see what performance is like, using the second set of texture streamer settings you gave:

streaming_buffer_size = 128
streaming_max_open_streams = 64
streaming_texture_pool_size = 400
surface_properties = "application_settings/global"
texture_streamer_settings = {
	streaming_buffer_size = 128
	streaming_texture_pool_size = 800

Have you tried messing with any of the other settings in the config file?
There’s the feedback streamer settings and a few more for the mesh streamer:

feedback_streamer_settings = {
	feedback_buffer_size = 4
	max_age_out_tiles_per_frame = 64
	max_streaming_tiles_per_frame = 64
	max_texture_pool_size = 1024
	max_write_feedback_threshold = 0.009
	min_write_feedback_threshold = 0.005
	staging_buffer_size = 4
	threaded_streamer = true
	tile_age_out_time_ms = 5000
	tile_staging_buffer_size = 4
}
lightfx = {
	enabled = false
}
mesh_streamer_settings = {
	disable = false
	eviction_timeout = 5
	frame_time_budget = 1
	io_buffer_budget = 10240
	limit = 700
}

The above values are all defaults

11

I haven’t done any experimenting with these yet, this is on my to do list for testing if I keep running into issues. I want to do some messing with the mesh streamer, that’s the next on my list but I need to isolate variables, have consistent game play time, ensure levels are the same with same difficulty and modifiers etc.

It gets quite time consuming and draining lol.

I spent a looong time trying to get SAM working well tbh. Ended up with a nothing burger

12

Yea, doesn’t help that there’s not a dedicated benchmark option indicative of real play. Sure you can go in the psykanium but there’s no active enemy AI or hordes there and no other places to move to that would load a lot of assets at once.

13

Oh just out of curiosity did you ever follow that DDU guide I put out? It does have some Windows tweaks that might help, like disabling fast startup to make sure any old drivers or system files are gone after a restart. It does mean starting from scratch and fully rebuilding the shader cache from playing for a while.

I never did try turning SAM off after I did that to fix my other issues so maybe it could fix stuff like that.

14

I haven’t needed to. I already have all my drivers auto updating disabled.

I have turned on AMD Shader Cache to always on in registry. I am currently running AMD Shader cache on w/ 512 and 1024 for the streaming_texture_pool sizes and it is working pretty well so far with the Audio and direct storage fixes. Not as smooth as 400/800 but its just a back and forward until I finalize the settings that work best for me.

Once i’ve dialed in on the settings that work without stutter and are the smoothest, I will be moving onto AMD SAM and trying to dial that in but I doubt that will work

1 Like
15

I’ve poked around a bit and noticed there’s also values for streaming buffer size and texture pool size in the win32_settings.ini.

While out of date, I did find some documentation with settings and defaults for the engine and seeing that now I’m curious about how PhysX is handled and what the default thread count is. The version included in the game files is 4.xx something and the one on that page was a 3.xx version but the most recent version is 5.4.2.

There’s also this page explaining various functions that caught my eye, including one that mentions override_texture_pool_size that might be of interest

16

Yeah I have read this documentation. Haven’t had time in the last 3 days to do testing sadly. But its another thing to add the the list :slight_smile:

17

I don’t know how (or if) this is relevant but last I checked the games dll files, the amd_ags_x64.dll file is a few versions old and only the two most recent versions support detecting the 7000 series. There’s obviously other ways to detect hardware and drivers and this shouldn’t cause problems in theory but you never know. Per AMD GPU Services (AGS) Library - AMD GPUOpen

18

Actually I might if I am on to something after all. I wonder if this is why the shader cache exe, darktide exe, and gpu detection exe all show up in the amd control panel separately

Screenshots_2024-12-14-18-42-08
Screenshots_2024-12-14-18-42-08872×235 64.7 KB

19

Have you tried swapping the file? Because this point seems very important to me for 7000 series GPUs

Version 6.2 has the addition of shader clock intrinsics to the API.

7000 series GPUs have a decoupled shader clock. So this might actually help? Im going to test it and get back to you

20

I haven’t yet, scrolling documentation while I do some holiday baking.

Also with streamer settings, don’t forget to change the values in the win32 settings file too. Same folder as the other settings file.