Larian Studios Forums Divine Divinity (English) Technical Problems "flickery" backround when camera moving, 40fps.

I tried to google my way out of this but I can't seem to be able to find a similar thread. There is a chance that I'm just expecting too much from 10 year+ old game though and this is all in my head.

My problem is that when the camera is moving the backround feels like it's "flickering". Basically it's not smooth and it gave me the feeling that it was sort of an FPS drop. So I ran fraps (with v-sync on) only to see that when the character is standing still the counter is at 60fps and when he's moving it drops to 40fps. With v-sync disabled, standing still fps is about 300fps and it drops to 40!!fps again when I move.

It's not that the game is unplayable but the environment feels like it's flickering and it's distracting

I'm running Windows 7, i5 2400/gtx570, Steam version 1.0062A

Thanks for reading.

Did you try running the game in Software mode, rather than Direct3D? That is set in the configuration program; there should be a shortcut in the start menu folder for the game, or you can start it directly from the configtool.exe program in the Divine Divinity install folder.

Did you try changing the resolution, to see if that made a difference?

Maybe forcing a lower FPS limit would make the game smoother?
Someone who ran into a problem with the game speed (Game Too Fast) used this as a fix (FPS Limiter Universal: Stabilize the performance of your games), and in Divinity 2 lowering the FPS cap could help some people who had issues with performance or animation stuttering. Neither of those match your situation, but it might be worth a shot, anyway.

Another thing that could help in Divinity 2 was in the nvidia control panel to set the number of frames to render ahead to zero for the game.

Very fast reply. Thank you.
I've already tried software mode and different resolutions to no avail. The fps limiter looks promising, I'm going to try and see how it works.

The game seems to run smoother now. I set DXtory to cap DD at 30fps and then set force V-sync through Nvidia panel.
Thanks for showing me the path Sir Raze.

I'd like to add.
I've done some further experimenting on the subject and I find something very odd. If you press shift and scroll around the camera everything is nice and smooth at 60fps. But when you click for the character to move somewhere, then everything drops to 40fps, hence the "flickery" and clunky feeling when moving.

This seems to be hard-coded in the game so I doubt that there is a solution around it. Also stuff like this might not be even noticeable by most gamers, but a a 20fps difference is really huge for my eyes and that's why I've been obsessing so much over this.
I really love DD but the fps drop is really distracting me, even more now that I've seen how smooth the camera movement can be at 60fps.

First world gamer problems I guess