Larian Studios Forums Divinity 2 - Ego Draconis (German) Technische Probleme Tips for people with performance problems

Hello,

My apologies for posting in English here, but I wanted to offer some quick aid for some of the problems we've seen reported here.

First of all, fixes for some of the problems reported (and actually also some of the feature requests) are present in the patch. This will be made available shortly, it's currently in the final stages of testing.

Second, here are some quick tips:

Divinity II - Ego Draconis streams a lot of its data from the hard disk drive, and as such it's very sensible to other programs accessing the hard disk, especially on lower end systems. You can increase the overall performance of the game by doing the following:

• Try turning off your virus scanner or register Divinity II - Ego Draconis as a safe executable, if you suffer from hickups during heavy streaming sequences.
• Shut down all non-essential Windows programs especially online chat programs, screen layout utilities etc....
• Regularly defragment your hard drive (this can heavily reduce loading times and streaming issues)
• Increase your amount of free hard drive space.


Always ensure you are using up-to-date drivers for your graphics card:

• For ATi cards, download drivers from: www.ati.amd.com/drivers
• For nVidia cards, download drivers from: www.nvidia.com/drivers

If hickups occur during normal playthrough with an nVidia graphic card, be sure to download and install latest drivers (84.xx + is advised)

The game does not support SLI or Crossfire setups, so it is adviced to turn these off when playing Divinity II - Ego Draconis. The game will run faster if it disabled.

If you are experiencing poor performance on a low-end graphics card...

* Reduce the game resolution to 1024x768 or lower.
* Try disabling all graphic options and reable these options one by one again, to reveal which option is causing the problem. Like this you can get the most out of your graphic card (for some settings you might have to restart your game before they take effect)

Whatever resolution you choose in the options screen, Divinity II - Ego Draconis will always try to render the GUI to the resolution of your desktop. This will make sure that the user interface is always sharp. But when you have a very high desktop resolution but with a low-end graphic card, this can give performance issues. This option can be disabled in the graphic options screen. You will need to restart the game to see the effect, and this might degrade your image quality a lot, depending on your desired ingame resolution.

What about the sloppy jerky animations of water surfaces, shadows, mills, animals and characters? It looks as if parts of the animations are missing...

Will those be fixed?

We realize that it was a mistake not to expose sliders which allow you to control the update speeds of these animations, and hope to make that feature available in a forthcoming patch together with a number of other options which will further increase the graphical quality. It was really an oversight on our side as it wasn't flagged during playtesting (probably because people got used to it), but as the engine actually allows a lot more and we see now that there is a demand for this, we'll work towards bringing this to you.

Moin Folks,

What about Map Markers ? I can set a Flag, but there is no Possibility to have some Text to this Marker. Sorry Guys, BUT i can not understand this ! Do you fix that ?

Second one, AA does not work, ist this Fix in your first Patch ?

Thx....

Best
ZappasGhost

Hi Lar_q,

some people have problems to get Anti Aliasing to work. Is it possible that you give us a little advice what drivers and settings we should use for ATI and NVidia? Probably the same you've used in your test-machines. Or is this problem also solved in the next patch?

I also have problems with SLI. All Settings i've tried are resulting in graphic errors. (and i've tried many settings, especially oriented on fallout 3 and oblivion-profiles)

Thats my pc:
Core i7 920@3ghz
Nvidia Geforce GTX 295(Driver 190.38)
6GB Ram
SB X-FI
Vista 64

Great news! Now that is what I call commitment! Thank you. The more graphical quality you can squeeze out of Divinity 2 the better!

Hi Kulin and welcome,

i wonder if you´ve overlooked this bit from Lar´s original post, perhaps?
Maybe this can shed some light for you on the SLI portion of your encountered issues:




Hopefully you can enjoy nevertheless,
Ragon

A tip for Vista users I haven't read here before and that solved all of my stuttering problems:

Install the game to your home directoy/drive (so, usually C:\*) and not to any secondary partition or alternate physical drive. Vista combined with some games/copy protection seems to hate that...

Installed on drive D in my case: stuttering video sequences, stuttering speech and audio, a MINUTE of delay before opening the options menu or initiating some dialogues.

Installed on "C:\Program Files (x86)\Divinity II - Ego Draconis" and it runs smoothly in 1680x1050, max settings...

Stuttering problems are usually always a case of something interfering with the games access to the HDD, or not having a multicore system.

The game streams in its content using a seperate thread, and if something is delaying/occassionaly blocking the streaming (or there is no such thread available to the system, or something else is using the thread), then you will have stuttering as necessary data is loaded in too late. The game then starts resolving to all kinds of emergency systems, leading to degraded graphics quality and performance.

In our office, streaming problems are usually related to the virus scanners or other "resident" applications, and when we switch them off, the streaming problems disappear. Fragmented HDD's are another cause as is running some other application in the background that takes up performance.

In my case, I'm pretty sure that none of the above apply. My crate (Dual Core E6850) is a 100% gaming machine, Vista is tweaked down to the barest necessities (UAC turned of, most services shut down, everything turned off not absolutely needed for a single user, gaming only PC).
There are definitley no applications running (except for NHancer), turning Avast off didn't change a thing.

The page file is minimized, the registry cleaned out, all drivers recent - the usuals.

Everything that was running before, while unplayable on partition D:, is still running now (mainly Logitech mouse and keyboard drivers and Avast) and not hindering performance any more...

Installing on drive C: was definitely the only change I made and the game has been running perfectly, with not a single crash or hiccup for more than 15 hours now...

I had the same phenomenon with Drakensang, btw, also by Dtp - which might use the same copy protection?

Page file minimized ?

I don't think that this could be a good idea, because I assume that Windiws would create a temporare kind of page file instead ...

Interesting to hear that about Drakensang - and yes they do, at least on the surface:
- SecuROM with DVD check feature only (no DRM, no online, no activation required)


However, if what you describe is really true, i´m really close to being p***ed.

I utterly HATE it when a program thinks it has to command me where to put it on MY computer.
I also heavily despise the "My Documents" concept of Windows. :rolleyes.


So in a nutshell:
I want to install programs to directories of my very own liking, without any (performance) penalties!
[ Do you copy, Lar?! ]


Having grown familiar with the UNIX world very much over the past years i have adopted the concept also many programmers employ:
Separate application and data as much as possible.

I even went as far as granting the applications a separate partition, but rather for transparency reasons
(it´s not really gaining much in terms of backup safety, because if you restore the system, you also have to do it with the applications at the same time. Or re-install them again one-by-one afterwards, which is very time consuming, though).

I also find it more useful for backup purposes - with the above i can make different sets, one for system backup, the other for archiving my valuable data (important documents, multimedia files, savegames etc.).
Usually my system needs a backup less often than the steadily growing amount of data.


But we´re leaving the topic... so back to it.

Cheers,
Ragon

I found the jerky animation very disturbing as well. Glad to see it's being worked on!

Also, would it be possible to have a slider to set the LOD? For example, in the starting village, the statue reverts to its low-res form after just a few paces. I'm only running on a single HD4870 and the game is as smooth as butter so I'm sure this wouldn't have too big an impact while it does annoy me a bit to see an ugly statue the moment I step away from it.

Otherwise, seems like a great game so far It makes me practice my German, that's for sure :p But I didn't want to miss out on that statue and two months is a long time to wait for an English version.

Another question: does the engine allow for Windowed mode?

Great to hear that. I hope the Patch with the fix for that problem is coming soon, Sometimes the Animations are really annoying...

Well i still got a problem i cant get a new ati driver on that page cause i got an ati readeon mobility x2500 can u help me ? greetings d0Shisha

d0Shisha: for mobile cards, most of the time, you should check the manufacturer of the notebook. Or you can try out "modded" drivers at your own risk. E.g. http://www.driverheaven.net/modtool.php or http://www.laptopvideo2go.com

If that doesn't work for you, check out this post: http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?p=3124358#post3124358

Do you use a raidsetup or one single harddrive? Because anyone with two or more drives should NOT install the game on the same hd as windows is on. If you're experiencing stuttering, it's propably an individual issue with your system and has nothing to do with installing it on another drive.

If im writing in a wrong topic, sorry
emmm, what should i do, if can see through stuff(My helmet, hair, people, plants, goblins and the list goes on...)? I know they are NOT ghosts, but i still can see through them, so what should i do?

No Raid setup or anything. Single harddrive, Two partitions. A small one with windows, and a large one for the data, the way many people liked it prior to the Vista debacle...

And no, it's very likely not a system issue. I have Fallout 3 (same engine!) running on D:, and it works like a charm (actually, better performance and less crashes than most people I know for that badly optimized sucker ). I have Mass Effect working fine on D:, The Witcher, NWN2. All without crashes, hiccups or any noticable lag.

The only 2 Games that absolutely demand to be installed on my C: drive are Drakensang (doesn't even start on D:) and Divinity 2 (lags like crazy).

No, both do.

At least with my system. (Winxp)

I have both on D: .