These aren’t brief stuttering spikes like I saw in Gotham Knights , either. That average doesn’t tell the full story because it compromised moments where the game was running at above 100 fps and below 55 fps, as you can see in the chart below. For reference, that’s performance you’ll see in Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K Ultra. At 4K Ultra with ray tracing turned off, I was averaging about 79 fps with the RTX 4090. I can still provide some round numbers, though. Hopefully, Fatshark will add a dedicated benchmark like it did in Warhammer: Vermintide 2. Finally, the game has some serious stability issues, as I’ll dig into in this section, so average frame rates are far from the most interesting aspect of this release. In addition, the cycling nature of missions and high level of randomness in hordes means it’s almost impossible to get a one-to-one comparison. I decided not to include strict benchmarks for Darktide. First and foremost, all of my testing was done in the beta, and the developer has promised a stability patch on launch day. Darktide is one of the few games where something like a 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X makes more sense than an eight-core Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The system requirements only call for a four-core Core i5-6600 at minimum, but there’s a reason the requirements climb to an eight-core CPU the next step up and go higher from there. You can usually forget about CPU requirements as you scale up to 4K, but not in Darktide. The ragdoll physics spread across immense hordes of enemies require a lot of parallel CPU processing That means the more cores you have, the better.

That leads me to believe that Fatshark’s expected fps values are a bit optimistic - the RTX 4090 is somewhere around 35% faster than the RTX 4080 at 4K. I played the game on an RTX 4090 and saw about 110 fps in-game with DLSS Frame Generation turned on and DLSS set to its Automatic mode. A big reason why is DLSS Frame Generation, which is absolutely necessary to get the game running at 100-plus frames per second (fps) with ray tracing turned up. You don’t need that to run the game, but that’s the GPU that developer Fatshark recommends going with if you want to max out all of the settings at 4K. Warhammer 40,000: Darktide system requirementsĪs far as I’m aware, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is the first game that recommends an Nvidia RTX 4080 in its system requirements.

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