Warhammer 40K Darktide has been off to a rough start in terms of performance, with many players dealing with bad framerate and frequent crashes. Thankfully, we’ve got you covered. Here’s everything you need to know about Warhammer 40K Darktide best settings to fix poor performance, including the best adjustments to make for common problems.
If you’re just jumping into Darktide, it’s worth taking a look at the Warhammer 40K Darktide classes and the best Warhammer 40K Darktide weapons to start on the right foot. If your PC performance permits, you’ll be able to take on the challenge of the hardest mission difficulties in no time.
Warhammer 40K Darktide best settings for PC
Warhammer 40K Darktide has extensive video settings options for PC players to customise to fit their hardware. However, many players are struggling to run the game due to poor performance and crashes.
Here are the Warhammer 40K Darktide best settings to change to fix poor performance:
- Ambient Occlusion quality (impacts GPU performance)
- Light quality (impacts GPU performance and memory consumption)
- Volumetric fog quality (impacts GPU performance)
- Screen space reflections (impacts GPU performance)
- Scatter density (impacts CPU performance)
- Max ragdolls (impacts CPU performance)
Alongside these important settings are some smaller changes that can help improve Warhammer 40K Darktide poor performance:
- Max weapon impact decals (impacts GPU performance)
- Max blood decals (impacts GPU performance)
- Decal lifetime (impacts GPU performance)
Turning these settings down can have a drastic impact on framerate, allowing you to increase graphical fidelity in other areas, markedly helping fix Warhammer 40K Darktide poor performance. When in doubt, use the in-game presets as a baseline.
Other Warhammer 40K Darktide best settings to fix performance include upscaling techniques such as Nvidia DLSS and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR).
- If you have an Nvidia GeForce RTX GPU, enabling DLSS can have a significant impact on Warhammer 40K Darktide poor performance
- If you have an AMD GPU, enabling FSR (either 1.0 or 2.0 if using a higher resolution such as 4K) drastically fixes Warhammer 40K Darktide poor performance
- Disabling ray-tracing also has a significant impact on performance, although the in-game setting is potentially bugged.
How to fix Warhammer 40K Darktide’s poor performance
There are several potential methods of fixing poor performance in Warhammer 40K Darktide. Using a combination of methods is likely necessary and experimenting with the best settings to fix poor performance in Warhammer 40K Darktide for your system is key.
Here are the current fixes for poor performance in Warhammer 40K Darktide:
- Get the best Warhammer 40K Darktide settings for your PC
- Disable ray-tracing via config files
- Change worker thread count via launcher
- Ensure graphics drivers are up to date
Disable ray-tracing to fix poor performance in Warhammer 40K Darktide
While there are ray-tracing settings in the in-game Darktide settings, it appears that ray-tracing is always enabled whether you have an RTX capable graphics card or not, thanks to some Reddit users. This means that on lower-end systems, players are experiencing bad framerates, crashes, and general poor performance in Warhammer 40K Darktide.
There is, however, a workaround to fix Warhammer 40K poor performance:
- Press ‘Windows’ + ‘R’ on your keyboard and search for ‘%appdata%’
- In the ‘Roaming’ folder, locate ‘Fatshark’ and then ‘Darktide’
- Open the ‘user_settings.config’ file in Notepad (make sure to backup this file in case Fatshark fix this issue)
Alter the following options to improve performance in Warhammer 40K Darktide:
- Set ‘ray_tracing_quality’ to “off”
- Set ‘rt_light_quality’ to “off”
- Set ‘rtxgi_enabled’ to “false”
Save the changes and view the properties of the file to ensure it is set as Read Only. With these Warhammer 40K Darktide best settings configured, you should notice a significant increase in performance, particularly on lower-end or older graphics cards.
Change Worker Threads to fix poor performance in Warhammer 40K Darktide
Another potential Warhammer 40K best setting to fix poor performance is to change the number of worker threads utilised. This setting changes how many CPU cores and threads are being used by Warhammer 40K Darktide. By default, it is supposed to be optimised to use your CPU most effectively. However, players have reported that changing the number of worker threads has had a significant impact on Warhammer 40K Darktide performance and crashes.
To change the number of worker threads used by Warhammer 40K Darktide, load up the game launcher. Before clicking ‘play’ enter the launcher settings where you will see an option for CPU worker threads. As this setting is highly dependent on your PC setup, it’s worth experimenting with lower worker thread counts to find the Warhammer 40K Darktide best settings to fix poor performance and crashes.
Update Drivers to fix poor performance in Warhammer 40K Darktide
Perhaps the most simple change to help improve Warhammer 40K poor performance is to ensure your graphics drivers are up to date. While this likely won’t fix bad framerate and crashes in Darktide, it can certainly help and is worth ruling-out as a course of the issues.
With these changes made, you should now have the best Warhammer 40K Darktide settings to fix poor performance and crashing. With that out of the way, you can dive deep into Tertium’s depths experiencing all the Warhammer 40K Darktide mission types available and earn Warhammer 40K cosmetics to outfit your character.