Warhammer 40,000: Darktide’s buggy ray tracing has been disabled
Players are still reporting ray tracing being on when it’s set to off by default
Ray tracing has been temporarily disabled in newly released co-op accent simulator Warhammer 40,000: Darktide due to issues with AMD and Intel graphics cards. Devs Fatshark say they’re looking into what’s causing the problems. Anecdotal reports from the Darktide subreddit seem to suggest that ray tracing was staying on for people who’d set the fancy lighting technique to off. For now, Fatshark say they've turned off ray tracing by default for all players until they can figure out what’s going on and implement a fix.
Ray tracing was disabled as part of Darktide’s day-one update for PC, and listed among the known issues that Fatshark are fiddling about trying to fix. “Ray tracing is currently disabled for AMD and Intel GPU users while investigating issues related to our support for these GPUs,” the patch notes read. “We are working closely with our hardware partners to resolve this as soon as possible. Until then, ray tracing is turned off by default to avoid any issues in playing the game.” Fatshark also noted they’re continuing to work on optimisation and performance for Darktide’s ray tracing.
Although the patch notes were issued at 6pm GMT yesterday, players were still reporting ray tracing being active and tanking frame rates in their game after that, despite it being set to off. Redditor Firestrike9 shared some recommendations to get those frames back up to reasonable levels, such as heading into Darktide’s config file and editing it to make sure ray tracing is definitely off. Turning all your graphics to low and setting DLSS on balanced are also claimed to help. I've reached out to Fatshark to check what's going on here, and will update if they get back to me.
You’ll be able to read some of AliceO.’s impressions of Darktide on the site later today, but Ed had a rollicking time with the game when he went hands-on with Darktide at Gamescom earlier this year. “Not only did our team win, but we also came away with a sense of comradery and I think that says it all,” he said. “Just don't go thinking this is going to shake-up the Vermintide formula. I reckon it's more of an extension, if anything.”
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is out on Steam and the Microsoft Store for £33/$40/€40. It’s also on PC Game Pass, if you’re a subscriber.