I recently built a high-end gaming PC, but Darktide feels surprisingly choppy at 2560×1440 on high settings. I'm seeing frame rates fluctuate between roughly 60 and 90 FPS, with no frame generation, FSR, or ray tracing enabled. The performance feels underwhelming compared with what I expected from this hardware, especially since my previous gaming laptop seemed steadier and sometimes faster.
The system includes a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, an X870 Taichi motherboard, a Radeon RX 9070 XT, 64GB of G.Skill DDR5-6000 memory in a 2×32GB configuration, and a 1200W power supply. Cooling is handled by an Arctic Liquid Freezer III, with the case fans replaced by D30s. Temperatures appear normal.
The system was set up by someone who doesn't play games, so I'd appreciate a systematic checklist for confirming that the BIOS, memory profile, chipset drivers, graphics drivers, and other performance settings are configured correctly. I'd also like to determine whether the issue is simply Darktide's normal performance behavior or whether something is misconfigured.
3 Answers
The 1200W power supply and liquid cooler should be more than adequate, and normal temperatures make thermal throttling less likely. Check GPU utilization, clock speeds, CPU clocks, and frame-time spikes while playing. If GPU usage is near 100%, the settings or the game’s rendering performance are probably the main factor; if usage is low while one or more CPU threads are saturated, the game may be CPU-limited or suffering from a configuration issue.
Start with the basic configuration checks: install the latest AMD graphics driver and chipset driver, confirm the monitor is connected to the graphics card, and verify that the memory profile is enabled in BIOS. On an AMD platform this is usually called EXPO, although some kits and boards may label profiles differently. DDR5-6000 running at default speed can noticeably reduce performance on a Ryzen system.
Use a frame-time and hardware-monitoring tool such as PresentMon with its GPU-focused preset. The graphs can show whether the GPU is fully occupied, whether the CPU is holding it back, and whether you’re seeing inconsistent frame pacing rather than simply a low average FPS. It should be useful with an AMD CPU and GPU as well.
Thanks, I’ll try that. Seeing the CPU and GPU wait times should help identify what is actually limiting performance.