Darktide - RTX is always ON even if you turned it off in the settings, here is how to fix it
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide just launched and there are a few problems that you should be aware of. One of them is the RTX (Ray Tracing) is always on bug. Users reported that they seem to have lower FPS than in the Pre-Order Beta of Darktide. Now we might finally know why. You can also find more help about FPS drops, stutters and crashes here.
The user Firestrike9 on Reddit reported that a Steam user Solivaguz found some weird settings within the Darktide user settings.
Even if you turn off all RTX settings it looks like that the game just ignores these settings and RTX will still be turned on. We can see that when looking into the usersettings file.
Here is what ours looked after we turned off RTX in the game. You can see that it is still on.
- rt_checkerboard_reflections = false
- rt_light_quality = "high"
- rt_mixed_reflections = true
- rt_particle_reflections_enabled = false
- rt_reflections_enabled = false
- rt_shadow_ray_multiplier = 2
- rt_transparent_reflections_enabled = false
- rtxgi_enabled = false
- rtxgi_scale = 1
And here is how it should look like when it is completely turned off according to Firestrike9.
- rt_checkerboard_reflections = false
- rt_light_quality = false
- rt_mixed_reflections = false
- rt_particle_reflections_enabled = false
- rt_reflections_enabled = false
- rt_shadow_ray_multiplier = 0
- rt_transparent_reflections_enabled = false
- rtxgi_enabled = false
- rtxgi_scale = 0
How to find the User_settings file in Darktide
Type "run" in the search bar on windows and then activate the program called "run". Now you can type %appdata% and then press enter. This will open up the file folder where you can find the folder "Fatshark". Inside there you can open the user_settings.config with Notepad and turn off the RTX options.
It looks like this bug appeared because Fatshark is trying to fix something with RTX. They said in their patch notes the following:
- Ray tracing is currently disabled for AMD and Intel GPU users while investigating issues related to our support for these GPU’s. 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.
- Ray tracing optimization and performance. This is an area we continue to work on, and see issues with performance.
It might be that the developer settings simply overwrite the user settings and thus it isn't turned off completely.
If you turn off all RTX settings this should give you a pretty big FPS boost. However, if you decide to change settings ingame that might reset your user settings in case you wonder why FPS drops again.
For further help you can also view our How to fix FPS drops, stutters and crashes in Darktide article.
We hope you found this quick article useful about how to turn off Ray Tracing in Darktide.
