Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Bugs & Technical Problems Most unusual performance issue

Hello fellow rpg people, I have encountered an issue of the most strange variety.


Occasionally when playing this amazing fricken game my room begins to heat up. As the temperature rises and I am thustly forced from beneath my alcove of comfy blankets various questions arise within my mind. Most of these lead me to the loud whirring noise I hear in yonder corner of thine room, nearest my PC. Upon further inspection I realize that the sound plaguing my ears so emanates not from the corner of the room, but from the PC its self. My fingers scramble for the alt+tab buttons, hands manipulating my mouse with the finesse of a seasoned first person shooter profession extraordinaire. It is now that my cursor lands upon gpu-z for several swift double clicks launch the program of much gpu monitoring.

Egast! With mouth agape.. and for reasons that escape me Elvis Presley's; "Burning Love" on the mind I stare in disbelief. Yikes! We have soared ever higher deep into the ranges of 70+ Celsius! Why?! I cry out to the heavens, arms outstretched, mind seeking answers.

What hath befallen me on this eve! Surely standing in the same spot I have been so so many times before cannot have possibly become more demanding. Now the troubleshooting begins.. oh yes it does. Restart the game? Check! Restart computer? Check! Lower settings? Check-arino. Nadda. Nothing. Not a single misbegotten setting avails me of this issue of rising temperatures.

This lead me down a dark and lonely road of "obscure troubleshooting", one of pure desperation. I must continue to get my fix, I say to myself. My quest cannot end here.. NO! We must escape Fort Joy for there is no joy to be found here.

What could it be then? I continue to ask myself mostly rhetorical questions. Hmm.. Hmmmmm.... Ah-hah! Why do we not attempt uncapping the framerate. Click. Click Click. Ohhhh.. uncapped appears to max out around roughly 120fps and what would you know it!? GPU usage hits 63%. Exactly the number it had reached during the unusual rise in temperature fiasco.

Mystery solved! Case closed.. except it is not because I wish for this to cease occurring at once! Why dost thine game report falsities? Why is my framerate monitoring software informing me that I am properly v-synced and resting at a stable 60fps when I am clearly not?

Can anyone explain this unusual behavior? It is far more prominent after saving the game and opening menus though it also occurs at times most random.

Steps taken and information gathered.
GPU - 780ti (Old, I am aware yet more then capable as with settings maxed it can achieve 120fps uncapped)
CPU - 4790K - 4.2 ghz

Clock frequency of gpu core during normal behavior - 1006.1 Mhz exactly.
GPU usage - between 24 and 48%

Clock frequency of gpu core during spike - 1150 MHz exactly (first maximum boost clock, second would be 1250 yet it never reaches this)
GPU usage - 63% EXACTLY every.. single.. time. The exact frequency and usage matches the frequency and usage monitored when the framerate is uncapped.

Now you might be thinking to yourselves; "This is not a problem. Surely you wish to achieve the best and highest possible framerates as all true PC users do." Nay! I say onto you, not during these sweltering hot summer months I do not!
Ohh, also the game fricken crashes when this begins to happen and that is not acceptable.. nope nope nope.

If anyone has any insight as to why the game is reporting 60fps yet behaving as if fast sync is enabled or the scene is being rendered twice I would be most pleased. Additional information as follows; CPU usage also increases respective to the faux increase in framerate. CPU usage is tied to framerate after all, higher framerate equates to additional cpu usage until a bottleneck is achieved. Thus my theories are only substantiated. The game is doing something funny and I don't like it.

If you disable V-sync, does that make a difference? Try triple buffering, if you had it set to double.

Try disabling all the post processing effects.

Try resetting your graphics driver's 3D settings to default (right click an open area of the desktop to start the nvidia Control) and poke around to see if there are any relevant settings. If there is a 'maximum frames to render ahead' option, try reducing it to 1 or 2 (IIRC the default is 3) to see if that makes a difference (could help with a performance issue some people had with Divinity 2).

Thank you for responding mister or misses!

Disabling then re-enabling V-Sync temporarily alleviates the problem. Only temporarily unfortunately as it soon returns.

All settings are on default except for pre-rendered frames which have already been set to 1 (remember this little trick I do from playing Dishonored 2). It helps be rid of minor micro stutter that's for sure.

The issue is less performance, per say as it is unusual behavior from the game engine (or how it interacts with my setup?).

With V-Sync on all is well for some time, temps are where I prefer them. Randomly, almost always within Fort Joy nearest the gate leading into the prison area temps shoot up. I sat there for several hours wracking my mind for answers.

If I lowered settings when this bug was occurring GPU usage did not go down as one might expect, and CPU usage increased. Which makes sense if the game is not respecting capped frames for some reason. When I lowered the settings the 'actual framerate' would increase. I realize that this is rather confusing to explain when reading back.. which is not helping me convey it. Aye, my last attempt shall be a driver update.

Alrighty, for a tldr;
V-Sync on with triple buffering + settings maxed = clock frequency of 1006.1 and temp of 54 C - framerate of 60 - gpu usage 24-44%
V-Sync off + settings maxed = clock frequency of 1150 and temp of 72-74 C - framerate of 120 - gpu usage 63%

When bug is occurring;
V-Sync on with triple buffering + settings maxed = clock frequency of 1150 and temp of 72-74 C - framerate of 60 - gpu usage 63%
V-Sync off + settings maxed = clock frequency of 1150 and temp of 72-74 C - framerate of 120 - gpu usage 63%
Lowering settings will not reduce gpu usage when the bug is in effect.

Seems like the engine caps framerate at 120 or I am hitting a cpu bottleneck there as usage never climbs above 63% either. Hope this helps in some way, kinda strange this bug be. If you need any more info like driver version just boop me and I shall put it here.

Fantastic game by the way! If I must I will endure a hotter room to keep playing it, way way wayyyyyy too much fun

Edit; Have been doing more of the testing.. even when the bug is not occurring setting everything to low only nets a 15-25% gpu load decrease? Hmm?! That includes disabling shadows entirely! Something is amiss here... Can anyone from the dev team confirm if this is perhaps an optimization issue on Kepler?

Did you try lowering the game resolution, as well? That should have a more direct impact on the GPU load than the graphics settings.

When this problem starts and you lower the settings, etc, does saving, quitting, restarting and reloading give the expected drop in the GPU usage and temperature? If so, does that last a while, or does the problem reoccur right away?

If you didn't do so for the driver update, you could try a clean re-install of the graphics drivers. See here or here.


Please email supportdos2@larian.com with a dxdiag report (WinKey-R, type in dxdiag and hit enter, then when it finishes loading click on the 'Save All Information...' button and save the report somewhere handy). Also check the '..\Divinity Original Sin 2\DefEd\bin' folder for the gold.log file to include, if it is not empty (zero bytes).
Alternately, zip them together and reply / PM with a Dropbox or Google drive link, etc.