With the game ready and primed to launch in late November, Fatshark is setting the stage by informing interested gamers about the technical side of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. Specifically, this means an in-depth look at the sort of hardware it takes to fully max it out, but the developer has taken things further still by explaining why the game needs such hefty hardware in the first place.

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Warhammer fans eager to serve the Imperium of Man in Darktide should be warned: Fatshark doesn’t appear to be pulling any punches this time around. Indeed, the developer’s latest performance-focused blog post says plainly that the game is pushing the “quality and quantity of things” in most respects. Players looking to max Darktide out with all the ray-traced bells and whistles may find the game somewhat hard to run, as the developer recommends the cutting-edge RTX 4080 graphics card from Nvidia. At the same time, Fatshark does warn that most PCs will end up being CPU-limited in some situations - a problem that may be partially alleviated by using Nvidia’s DLSS 3 frame generation technology.

It’s somewhat surreal to see the last generation’s RTX 3080 as the recommended GPU to run Darktide at 1080p, but Fatshark’s remarkably detailed blog explains that the studio isn’t pulling any visual punches here. In fact, Darktide’s unique mix of melee and gun combat against over a hundred enemies all at once may be enough to push most regular PCs to their respective limits. Gamers without the latest and greatest GPUs shouldn’t despair, however, as Fatshark has promised a huge array of granular graphics settings to play around with, allowing PC gamers to tweak its visuals however they see fit.

Good news for those who don’t have Nvidia RTX graphics cards is that the game will also support AMD’s FSR 2.0 upscaler. Though not quite as good as DLSS in most respects, this upscaling solution can still trade blows with it, and its most important feature is that it doesn’t require Nvidia’s own specific Tensor hardware to run. The old FSR 1.0, too, will be available for even older GPUs, promising great scalability across the board.

One way of side-stepping potential performance concerns would be to play Darktide on Xbox Game Pass, of course. Considering the fact that the game is so heavy on PC hardware, however, and given that it’s not coming to last-gen Xbox One at all, it does seem likely that Xbox gamers may end up having to run the game locked at 30 FPS.

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide releases on November 30, 2022, for PC and Xbox Series X/S.

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