Warhammer 40k Darktide settings for best performance

Finding the best Darktide settings is extremely important to your gaming experience. Unless you’re playing on a next-gen tank, it won’t be possible to get everything ‘high’. You’ll have to balance performance and visual quality, making the game playable without sacrificing too much.

To help you find the best Darktide settings for maximum performance, here’s a list of all the options in the order they appear in the game. It explains each setting so you can make the right choice based on the power of your hardware. However, if Darktide error codes are causing you some issues as well, check out our guide on that as well.

Darktide best display settings

• Field of view: It’s usually better to have a high viewing angle, as it determines how much of the game appears on your screen. However, this setting has a lot of impact on performance, so it’s usually best to stay in the 90-100 HFOV range (VFOV adjusts automatically based on aspect ratio).
• Resolution: go with your monitor’s native resolution.
• Display mode: Fullscreen.
• V-Sync: it fixes screen tearing, but it’s better to turn it off.
• Brightness: it depends on your taste. If the game looks too dark, open it.

Darktide best performance settings

• Nvidia DLSS: open (if applicable).
• Super Resolution: ‘quality’ seems to work best, but feel free to play with that.
• Nvidia Reflex Low Latency: enabled.
• Framerate Limit: unlimited (but can be limited to get a more stable FPS).
• FidelityFX Super Resolution 2: turning it on can significantly improve your performance and quality (unless you have Super Resolution enabled). ‘Quality’ seems to work best for most players, but feel free to test it out for yourself.
• FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0: may work better than FSR 2 on older PCs.
• Sharpen: it improves edge quality and doesn’t affect performance much, so it’s usually best to turn it on.
• Anti-aliasing: it softens the rough edges, but it’s best to turn it off as it can affect performance.

Darktide best ray tracing settings

• Ray tracing: It offers very nice light reflection and lighting effects, but it can seriously affect the performance of the game. Our advice is to turn it off or keep it low.
• Ray traced reflections: likewise, turn it off to improve performance.
• RTX Global Lighting: It is similar to the above, although it has less impact on GPU performance.

Darktide best advanced graphics settings

• Ambient Occlusion Quality: looks nice, but whether you can do this at ‘high’ depends on your PC. Most people should go for the ambiance.
• Light Quality: as above, try the middle first.
• Volumetric Fog Quality: also medium or low (fog quality is not as important as light quality).
• depth of field: Turn it off if you don’t like the camera-like focus effect.
• Global illumination: set ‘high’ without ray tracing.
• Bloom: glow effect, it doesn’t have much effect, so turn it on.
• Skin Sub-Surface Scattering: not the most important visual, turn it off to improve performance.
• Motion blur: can increase immersion, but this is not usually a priority in a shooter. It’s best to leave.
• Screen Space Reflections: middle.
• Lens Quality: hungry.
• Lens Quality Color Edge: You can leave that on too, but that’s up to your taste buds.
• Lens Quality Deterioration: it depends on taste.
• Lens lights: Depends on taste, some people find it irritating.
• Distribution Density: affects the amount of detailed items that appear on the screen, such as debris. If you experience lag, reduce it to 0.5 or less.
• Max Rag Dolls: Determines the number of enemy ragdolls. This has a high impact on CPU performance, so even high end PCs should be careful about getting it above 12. Six to eight is recommended for most players.
• Max Weapon Impact Stickers: Do not put it higher than 50. If you only experience lag in heated battles, try lowering it to 20.
• Maximum Blood Stickers: same as above.
• Sticker Life: Determines how long the blood sticker will remain visible. You can reduce this to around 20 for higher performance in intense fights.

Best Darktide settings for everything else

Every other Darktide setting, such as volume and keybindings, depends on your personal taste and needs. In particular, you may want to enable subtitles to follow the story more easily. There is also an option to reduce bloodstain in the video settings menu or enable the profanity filter in the interface settings.

Enjoy your new best Darktide settings and check out our Warhammer 40k: Darktide review (opens in new tab) To see what we think of the game so far.