Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is a rare thing in modern gaming: a PC-centric release, based on unique game engine technology. When it launched last year, it certainly stood out from the crowd with detailed, evocative visuals and extremely detailed environmental artwork, along with extensive ray tracing features. However, it also arrived with a variety of performance issues, from network stability problems to frame-time hitching, even for those with higher-end kit. The game’s brand-new port to Xbox Series consoles is an interesting opportunity to see just how well the game can scale to a lower-end fixed platform. Can Series X get anywhere close to a high-end PC experience, and what about Series S?
Darktide looks surprisingly impressive for a multiplayer-centric game. Most multiplayer titles sacrifice visual fidelity to achieve higher frame-rates and effectively target a wider range of potential hardware configurations, but this game is very different. For starters, there’s an extreme level of environmental detail in each gameplay space.
If you take a close look at virtually any surface in Darktide, it has an intense amount of detail. The game is mostly set in indoor environments made of angular stamped metal and draped in wires and pipes, all of which hold up even at extreme close range. Everything is “greebled” or covered with nonfunctional bits of detail, that greatly enhance the complexity of the game environments. This is mostly accomplished through a mix of a high geometric density and parallax mapping – a genuine surprise for a co-op shooter.
