How to improve FPS in Warhammer 40,000: Darktide (PC)
Darktide throws you into the bowels of Tertium, an industrial hive devoured by Chaos corruption, where your squad of four Rejects hacks through endless enemy hordes with chainswords. Fatshark's engine has to calculate in real time how dozens of cultists and poxwalkers surround, dodge, and attack you at once, something that in 2022 tanked performance on nearly any CPU. With successive patches the game greatly improved its load distribution across cores, but mass combat remains the real bottleneck, more so than the GPU itself. On top of that there's a grimy, oppressive aesthetic, with volumetric fog, dense lighting, and highly detailed dismemberment that demand plenty from the graphics card. This guide helps you find the balance between smoothness and that gothic atmosphere that makes the game unique.
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Calculations based on our FPS model combined with the % gain of each setting (measured in public benchmarks).
1. Quick wins (no visual loss)
Start here. Each one adds a little, but together they give +27% free FPS.
Volumetric Fog
Volumetric fog is a visual trademark of Tertium, but its real-time calculation is one of Darktide's most expensive effects. Lowering it to Medium preserves the dark atmosphere of the tunnels without paying the full cost of Ultra.
Shadow Quality
Dynamic shadows from hordes moving through narrow corridors are another performance hotspot. Reducing this option eases GPU load considerably without the game's dark zones losing readability.
Chromatic Aberration
This post-processing effect distorts the screen edges to imitate camera optical aberration. It adds very little to the atmosphere and many players disable it outright by preference, with the extra benefit of minimally easing the GPU.
Film Grain
Film grain adds texture to the image to reinforce the game's grimy, grimdark tone, but it costs some performance in the post-processing pass and can be annoying on large screens.
Motion Blur
Motion blur in a melee combat shooter as frantic as Darktide tends to disorient more than help. Disabling it improves visual clarity during fast fights and frees up a bit of render load.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Texture Quality
Darktide's textures are very well optimized and depend mostly on available VRAM rather than the render core. Dropping from Ultra to High frees up video memory with barely any noticeable difference in the sharpness of armor and environments.
Anti-Aliasing
The game's TAA smooths edges well amid the visual chaos of a horde, but at its highest level it adds a notable render cost. A middle setting still disguises jaggies without penalizing frames as much.
SSR (Screen Space Reflections)
Reflections on metallic surfaces and wet floors in Tertium's factories use screen-space reflections, an expensive effect that quickly loses sharpness across the whole scene. Lowering it to Low reduces its cost a lot with a visual loss that's hard to notice in combat.
Particle Quality
Blood splatter explosions, weapon sparks, and special-ability effects generate an enormous amount of simultaneous particles during horde fights. On Medium, the sense of visual chaos and combat feedback is preserved while trimming render cost in the most saturated moments.
Ray Tracing (Reflections)
Darktide includes optional ray tracing for reflections, with a considerable performance cost even on powerful GPUs. Given that the atmosphere is already dark and thick with fog, the visual benefit rarely compensates for the frame drop in combat.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
NVIDIA DLSS
+35% FPSAdded after launch, DLSS 2 is the most efficient scaling option in Darktide for RTX cards. In Balanced mode it offers a notable performance jump with very little sharpness loss, ideal for sustaining framerate during the densest hordes.
AMD FSR 2
+28% FPSFSR 2 also arrived in a post-launch patch and works on any GPU, not just AMD. It's somewhat less sharp than DLSS at an equal scaling level, but it's still a very useful tool for squeezing more out of mid-range cards.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable Resizable BAR from the control panel if your motherboard supports it: Darktide benefits measurably in dense horde scenes.
- •Use DLSS in Quality or Balanced mode instead of forcing native resolution; the game's engine responds better by freeing up GPU for shadows and fog.
- •Keep Game Ready drivers updated, since Fatshark has coordinated several performance patches together with NVIDIA-specific optimizations.
AMD
- •Enable Smart Access Memory in the BIOS, equivalent to Resizable BAR, to improve data flow between CPU and GPU during mass combat.
- •FSR 2 is your best ally on mid-range RDNA2/RDNA3 cards to offset the cost of volumetric fog and shadows.
- •Check that the GPU power mode is set to performance and not balanced, since the game has very sharp load spikes during waves.
Sistema
- •Prioritize a processor with good single-core performance: Darktide still depends heavily on the speed of a main thread for horde AI, more than on total core count.
- •Install the game on an SSD (preferably NVMe): waves constantly load enemies and assets, and a slow disk causes noticeable microcuts.
- •Close background overlays and recording programs; being a very CPU-dependent game, any additional process competes directly for the same limited resource.
5. Known game issues
Microstutters in large hordes
During mass wave events, especially at the "ordo dockets," the AI of dozens of enemies calculating routes and simultaneous attacks can cause occasional frame drops even on powerful CPUs, since much of that calculation falls on a single main thread.
Estado: 2023-2024 performance patches
Shader compilation stutter on first launch
After installing the game or a major update, the first matches can suffer hitching while the engine compiles shaders in the background. It usually disappears after the first few play sessions.
VRAM usage spikes in long levels
In extended missions without a level restart, some players with 6GB of VRAM or less report a progressive memory buildup that can lead to hitching after 30-40 minutes of continuous play.
6. Frequently asked questions
Why does Darktide run poorly even with a powerful GPU?▾
Is it worth enabling DLSS or FSR in Darktide?▾
Has performance improved since the 2022 launch?▾
Which graphics setting gives the most FPS with the least visual loss?▾
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Calculate FPS for Warhammer 40,000: Darktide →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →