I recently built a high-end gaming PC, but Darktide feels unusually choppy at 2560×1440 on high settings. I'm seeing roughly 60–90 FPS without frame generation, FSR, or ray tracing, and the frame pacing feels inconsistent despite the system's hardware. The build uses 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 fans replaced by D30s. Temperatures look normal. I'm looking for a systematic checklist to verify BIOS settings, memory configuration, drivers, and anything else that could explain the performance. I previously used a gaming laptop with an RTX 5090 and remember getting steadier, higher frame rates, so I'm wondering whether something is misconfigured or whether Darktide is simply demanding at these settings.
4 Answers
A laptop RTX 5090 isn’t necessarily far ahead of a desktop RX 9070 XT in every workload, so the comparison may not be as direct as it seems. Still, the desktop should perform well at 1440p. Check driver and chipset installation first, then monitor GPU usage, clock speeds, temperatures, power draw, and frame times while playing. Those readings should reveal whether the card is being fully utilized or whether something is limiting it.
Use a monitoring tool such as Intel PresentMon and enable its GPU-focused view. It can show GPU utilization, CPU and GPU wait times, frame-time graphs, and other details that help identify whether the bottleneck is the processor, graphics card, or inconsistent frame pacing. It should still be useful with an AMD CPU and Radeon GPU.
Darktide is a demanding AAA game, and its performance can vary a lot depending on the area and settings. Around 90 FPS at 1440p may be normal in some situations, especially without upscaling. It would be useful to compare against another demanding title, such as Space Marine 2, to determine whether this is a general system issue or mostly a Darktide optimization problem.
That makes sense. I’ll test another demanding game so I can see whether the problem follows the system or is specific to Darktide.
First, check the basic configuration items: install the latest AMD chipset and graphics drivers, confirm the motherboard BIOS is current, and enable the correct memory overclocking profile. On an AMD platform that profile is usually called EXPO rather than XMP. Also verify that the memory is running at DDR5-6000 instead of its slower default speed. The motherboard and memory capacity are more than you need for gaming, but they shouldn’t by themselves cause this level of stutter.
Good suggestion. I mainly want to confirm whether the CPU or GPU is actually waiting on something, so I’ll give that a try.