Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - Technical Issues FPS drop over time

The game starts at 60fps and over time drops a few fps at a time to a point its running at 30fps and below within 10mins. Ive noticed alot of posts from player on other forums who had this same problem months ago and after purchasing this game in the recent Steam sale, its still present and not addressed by the devs it seems.

Ive tried many different things, changing ingame graphics settings, GPU settings and following advise from other forums but still get the fps drop over time. Auto saves help to restore the fps but eventually that stops working and having to reload the save is the only way to get the fps back to 60 again and then the whole fps drop process starts again, rinse and repeat. This breaks the immersion of the game and spoils it.

Also I can confirm like so many others have also, the game only uses 1 CPU core. I dont know the in and outs of whats going on with this game but ill say how I see it. The game feels like is has not been optimized (employ beta testers and make sure they do their job) to use more than 1 CPU core, hence the 1 core overloads and causes the ingame fps to slow down the more the CPU gets stressed under the pressure.

Ive had the game for only a couple days and found this out myself just by running tests and then read the forum posts and it confirmed everything. So my conclusion is the devs know this problem exists because random joe like myself found it within a couple days playing. Either the devs dont know how to solve the problem or they cant solve the problem, either way the problem isn't being address verbally from what i have read or physically (who knows).

My advice to the devs, just be honest and tell the players if the problem can or cant be fixed and you will at least gain respect for your honesty. If you keep ignoring the complaints of players who bought your game, players will keep asking the same questions over and over again. It will get to the point the questions will stop being asked and players will stop buying any future games you may develop and you can say goodbye to your company. This is the honest truth, if you have a good rep in the gaming community for delivering a quality product you will be remembered and you company will last, if not well thats obvious from past game companies who have come and gone.

Your core game is prefect, realtime exploration with turned based combat is why i followed your game. Old school rpg elements, its all here but your let down by the quality. No point having a sports car if the engine doesnt work, you know what i mean devs.

One person who had this problem said disabling anti-aliasing in the options helped, another set the option in their Radeon pro to 'force game process high priority'.

I ran into this problem once (FPS drop on conversations, restored by quicksaving), after my computer had been on for several days and I had a few more than the usual background programs running. Rebooting fixed that, and it hasn't occurred again.

If you email supportdos@larian.com, with a description of the problem (or link to this post) and the report.zip file generated by the D:OS support tool (for the PC version), I'll add that to the bug report for this issue. That may help narrow down the cause of the problem, and will at least remind the programmers about it and confirm it is still an issue in the latest version.
The report will contain system and game information, as well as your saved games. To reduce the file size, you can delete all but maybe one save from the zip.

Thanks for replying Raze. Ive sent the report.zip and the link of this forum post. Hopefully someone can address this issue. The game is really great but after playing for 10-30ming, then having 22 fps and having to reload my coop game all the time it becomes frustrating.

You said you get fps drop when in conversations, its strange because the fps goes back to 50-60s when in conversation for me but as soon as i leave the conversation it goes back to 20-30s. Even when i change GPU and ingame graphics setting whilst in the game, the fps never changes. The fps should change if for example changing to the lowest settings possible and then changing it to the highest settings possible but it does not even change. It doesn't matter if the games running at 60fps at the very start of a game or the after 10-30mins when its crawling at 20fps, changing the ingame graphic settings has no change on the fps.

I have recently bought this game on Steam, due to the absolutely glowing reviews! So far I'm enjoying it, and can't wait to get deeper into the game. But I have ran into the same problem that Egg and others have reported. I start out at 60 fps, the fps will drop after a conversation with an npc, and can only be recovered by saving, or loading. Saving is a temporary solution however, as the first drop to around 55 fps will be returned to 60 fps upon saving, when it drops again, the fps will go even lower, to around 40-45 IIRC, then returned to 60 with saving.. but go to 30 or so with the next drop, and so on. At this point I have been reloading the game.. only to repeat the whole cycle again. As you can imagine this is quite frustrating! This problem did not present itself until reaching the first town, which makes sense, as until that point I had not been having many conversations.

@Raze - I find it confusing that you yourself experienced this problem, but managed to solve it by closing programs and restarting. The only background programs I have had running are ones that I can't really close - steam (I bought the game on steam) and fraps (so that I can monitor the fps drops caused by this issue). You say that it was an unusual amount of programs you had been running, so I doubt steam and fraps are the issue. As for the fact your computer hadn't been restarted in several days, this is a non-factor, as I booted up my computer about an hour before I first encountered this issue. Even though I doubted this was the cause, I restarted my computer anyway and the problem still occured. So this is very confusing :(. Maybe fraps is the issue? I generally run fraps when playing a new game, to see how my rig is coping. I'll try running it without fraps and see what happens. What program do you use to monitor your FPS? Have you had steam running in the background while playing?

So if it wasn't programs running in the background, and it wasn't retarting that solved it for you, what could it have been? :O

My rig:

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Intel Core i5 4690
8 GB Corsair RAM
ASUS SABERTOOTH Z97 MARK 1
2048MB ATI AMD Radeon HD 7850
238GB Crucial_CT256MX1 SSD

My GPU and CPU are not OC'd, although CPU is running with the intel boost thing activiated.

Hopefully this issue will be solved swiftly. I've had too many poor experiences with games in the last few years due to FPS related issues and poor optimization etc, it's getting to the point where I don't trust any developer to make games that WORK anymore. It seems everyone is after a fast profit, and not actually willing to put in the effort required to make the game properly. Game breaking bugs and brutal performance issues are the norm it seems. Sorry if I seem like a grumpy prick, but having just upgraded my rig to try and rid myself of these issues, it's just depressing to find yet another game with yet another game-breaking problem. :(

Hopefully you guys will restore my faith in the industry and gain yourself a loyal supporter/customer!

Regards,

Anoose

During the time I had left the computer running continuously, I was also periodically testing things that crashed the game or caused it to hang cleaning up a level, etc, requiring an Alt-F4 to get out of. To narrow down or try to find a workaround for each issue, I could crash/hang the game half a dozen times in a row...

You could actually try the game without Steam or Fraps running, but I don't think they would be enough to cause this issue. You can start the game directly from the '..\SteamApps\common\Divinity - Original Sin\Shipping\EoCApp.exe' program file (by not starting it through Steam, you just will not have access to the Steamworks functions: Steam lobby and invite functions, achievement and playtime tracking). If the FPS drop isn't visibly noticeable, then it isn't as much of a problem (I noticed the drop down to 40FPS, and sometimes as low as 30 for short periods). After rebooting and starting Steam, Fraps and the game I got 50-60 running around a bit in the Dark Forest and 55-60 in the Cyseal marketplace, usually on the higher end of those ranges; in that case the FPS changes were not visible, except in the Fraps OSD.

My system is fairly similar to yours: Win7 Pro 64, ASUS Sabertooth Z77, Core i5 3570K, 16GB RAM, ATI HD7870, SSD for Windows/programs, HDD for games/music.

I'm having this issue too. I'll start the game at 60fps, but over 10 or 20 minutes, I idle around 40fps. This is with settings at max. When I turn everything down I only get back up to, like, 45fps. It seems like I should easily be able to hit 60, especially with the settings all the way down like that. I have a GTX 670 and an i5 3570k. Furthermore, when my fps drops down to the low 40s, and I start a conversation, it jumps back up to perfect 60fps! But only for the duration of the conversation, then it's back to where it was before. What the heck? This is particularly annoying for a PC game like this, where you interact mainly with the mouse. Anything lower than 60, especially by 10-20fps, feels really sluggish and just makes me not want to play the game. :(