Larian Studios Forums Divine Divinity (English) Technical Problems Game Slowing Down

Hi all,

I am new to this board.

I have a question about game speed. I browsed the tech forum but didn't see topics with 'slo(ing)' in it so i signed up.

My problem is that after a while, perhaps 30 minutes to 45 minutes the game tends to slow down. The FPS is going down dramatically to the point that the pointer flips all over the screen. You know what I mean I think. To be able to press on I have to pause the game to get my bearings on the pointer and then put it where I want to click to go.
My specs are good enough. Pentium 1700, 256 RAM, Geforce 2. Use latest drivers from nvidia. Should be sufficient.

What could it be? Memory? These maps are titanic! I mean, I don't know if it all loads into RAM but...huge!

Any tips?
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There are many possible things which could cause this prob. Without knowing more about your Configuration we can only guess. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" />

First of all install the latest Patch ! There is a bug in Verdistis causing the game to slow down. The patch should cancels this out! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Second: Check your system temperature! (You know how to do it? There is an option for this in the BIOS!) If you have a too high system temperature your computer will automatically slow down, in order to avoid overheating...
...happens about 71, 72 degrees centigrade.

Third: Disable all other programs, such as Virus scan running in the background. This programs need much of your memory.

Forth: Turn down your screen resolution and details a bit! What you should do anyway is to turn your colour resolution to 16bit instead of 32!

Hope that helps

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Ah yes. Sound advice. I turn some thing off. like ICQ and some small things. But not my virus scanner. I doubt that will make much difference. I mean, I can play Unreal II in 1024x768 in 32 bit colour and very slick textures. And it is also not the temperature. Never have temp. problems.

My Geforce 2 has 64 MB RAM. Perhaps that is a bit less than is comfy these days. I have to say that this game rocks with gfx! I mean, the dungeons under Aleroth are superb! The detail is gorgeous so I refuse to tone it down to 16. If I have to i will just reset my PC evey hour. It is worth it. So it is not a real big deal to me. i;ll try if it also slows down in 800x600. Or do that alphablit thing?

The Divinity graphics were designed at 16 bit, so having the desktop colour depth at 32 bit is not going to help. It usually doesn't hurt, but some people have had problems with that.

Anti-virus scanners are actually one of the worst offenders for slowing down system performance, especially if they are set to scan everything in real time.

I see. Well yesternight I closed everything in systray and disabled my v-scanner. But it had no effect. Closing the game and restarting it does not help either. In fact, after i close the game my whole PC is shaky. And slowed. When I restart
it won't even start anymore and the gauge goes half way and then stops.

Seems like there is some sort of memory leak. And it affects windows. Perhaps it does not free all the used memory after closing the game.

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Am experiencing similar problems on my 1 Ghz machine, 512 Mb memory, GEForce2 MX w/latest nVidia driver, DirectX 9.0b, and latest Divinity patch installed. After about 1 hour of game play, I notice that all sound effects and music begin to echo and at the same time my character begins to move more and more slowly. When this begins to happen, unless I save the game, exit the program, and reboot, Divinity will eventually crash. Incidentally, I have never been able to configure graphics to run at anything higher than 800 x 600 resolution without Divinity crashing.

i would suggest a nice clean uninstall after zipping and saving your player folder somewhere else, try reinstalling after a scan and a defrag........that usually helps! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" /> and don't forget the patches #1, #2, and #3 ....good luck! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/up.gif" alt="" />

[color:"orange"] Anti-virus scanners are actually one of the worst offenders for slowing down system performance [/color]

Also double check your system with a spy ware detector like Spybot you might find quite a few offenders <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />

In addition to anti-virus programs, make sure you turn off all non-essential programs (email, instant messengers, wallpaper changers, etc) before running the game.

I played Divinity at 1024x768 on a computer with 512MB memory, GeForce2 MX and a 900MHz processor (later upgraded to 1.3GHz) without slowdowns (except minor temporary ones when there were a lot of trees or NPCs on screen) or crashes (except a couple with Repair). I have DirectX 8, rather than 9, though.

You only need the latest patch, it contains all the changes in the previous hotfixes.

Troubleshooting Tips (& manual install procedure)