First of all: Congrats to Larian on a successful alpha release. Loving it so far and going to have to really force myself to quit playing in order not to spoil too much of the full game. Keep up the great work!

Now on the subject of this post: Is anyone else getting fairly low fps in spite of a pretty high end system?

My specs: Intel i5-2500K (@4.2 GHz), 32GB RAM, 2x nVidia GeForce GTX 770 (SLI) and a Samsung EVO 840 1TB SSD. OS is Win 7 64-bit Ultimate and I got the latest official nV drivers.

Getting ~30fps most of the time with auto-detected 'Ultra' in-game settings at 2560x1440. When I disabled VSync (which should actually have no effect since I have Adaptive VSync enabled globally via the nV control panel) I got maybe ~35fps.

It's perfectly playable, of course, but I'm wondering if this is the same for everyone(?)


What's the deal here? Is the game really that demanding or is there a fps lock or any other limiting factors at work?

What's your GPU utilization/ CPU utilization?

As for my GPUs both GTX 770 are at 100% in SLI. I am actually running nVidia Surround with three screens on the desktop (7680 x 1440) but for the game I'm fine with a single screen and 2560 x 1440 resolution.

Not sure about CPU load. Guess I will have to check with task manager next time I fire up the game.

Maybe it's driver optimization. What's your monitor as well?

I'm using a 27" ASUS 144hz monitor with a 3gig AMD Sapphire 7950 - 3.2ghz quadcore AMD cpu, 4 gigs o' ram, 7200 HDD, Vista 64bit. And it all runs smooth and fast for me. There are some areas where I have seen a bit of stuttering and clipping but I can't seem to pin it down. Overall I'm pretty impressed with the performance for the current state of the game.

@ Cutter: As I posted I'm running 2560 x 1440 with the latest nVidia drivers in SLI nVidia surround mode. The screen (or all three for that matter but as I said I'm only using one of them for this game) is a Samsung SA850.

My game runs (mostly) smooth as well except, just like yours, some artifacts and tearing (doesn't seem to matter much or actually at all whether VSync is on or off).

However, I'm wondering about the generally low fps at around the ~30-ish mark. I'm wondering about the cause of the low fps and I'd like to hear from people what fps they are getting.
If someone with a lower end system than mine is getting a rock solid 60fps with VSync enabled then I'd know I'd have to look into things on my end.

This is not meant as a complaint post but more as a "let's do some research and find out why the game is not running at 60fps" (with VSync or with Adaptive VSync enabled) post.

Cuz at the end of the day, even though the visuals are gorgeous, this is definitely a game that should be producing a lot more fps than ~30 on a SLI setup like mine. So... what is consuming all that power? What drops the fps down to the ~30-ish area? Or is it just me?

The alpha version is not optimized for performance, so the game is currently indeed a lot more resource hungry than it could/should be, as you obviously have noticed. In the words of Donald Knuth. "Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming."

I hear that (completely) enabling/disabling shadows can result a disproportional effect on performance. Last time I checked, disabling had to be done by manually editing the config file in D:OS's folder "my documents". Maybe it would be interesting if you could see how performance scales on your system by using different settings.

On my system at home, I get a good 40 fps (according to fraps) most of the time with ultra settings on 1280x1024 (yeah yeah I still have one of those ). It is a core 2 duo 3GHz, with 4GiB RAM and an AMD HD6850.

Also see this somewhat related older thread.

I get performance that's somewhat unplayable. I've got i5 2500K @ 5Ghz, GTX680, 16Gb RAM. Most areas are around 20fps, King Crab Tavern is 10 or so. This is on Medium presets. Going to Low doesn't really make any difference. I get that this is an alpha and all, but my question is how can you test something that's running below 30fps, it's extremely annoying

Their QA team must have monster rigs.

The GPU is running at 99%, the CPU at 25%. It basically completely utilizes a single core of the CPU meaning this is a single threaded process at this stage. The GPU running at steady 99% definitely shows complete lack of optimization. I bet they use different builds for testing.

It would be somewhat nonsensical to give the alpha-testers a different build than the one they use themselves, as having different builds could imply having different bugs. The game however is running alright on my rig, as shown in my previous post in this thread. I suspect the main reason being that the single-threaded performance of a 3GHz core 2 duo is probably a bit better than on your CPU. Maybe not, as you seem to have overclocked the CPU. Skipped that bit on the first read.

Mine seems to run great.
I5 2500k
16gb DDR3
GTX 660TI

I seem to get around 40-50 FPS. Everything is maxed out. I get some tearing if I turn Vsync off. No problems otherwise. Was a little choppy when I would join a friends game but I assume that was either due to his machine or our internet connection...

Also getting good performance my side, solid 60fps through everything, max settings on 1920x1080.

I5 2500k
16bg ddr3
GTX 470

Also I've read some people only having it run on one core? Intended or not I have it running on at least 2.

I'll try to reinstall windows7 to see if it helps. It's a second game that is performing unreasonably poorly, the first being MGS Rising Revengeance. I wrote that off to it being a piss poor console port, but then again there are people with almost identical pcs who have no problems. If JFSeiki is getting 60fps on a 470, I should get better performance on a 670 theoretically

Same performance on a fresh Win7 64bit install, nothing but latest drivers and updates. What a waste of time...

Perhaps I should have also stated I have custom drivers for just about everything on my machine and a 6 second boot time without a solid state drive. Still haven't found a game that doesn't perform below 60 so I guess I'm not much help.

@Moriendor
I think it is the SLI scaling issue. Can you try to disable SLI for DOS and force it to run on singlecard?

I can't get above 20FPS even on "Very Low" settings at 1600x900 on:

Dell Inspiron 5423 14z

Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3317U CPU @ 1.70GHz
AMD Radeon HD 7570M
Intel(R) HD Graphics 4000 (switchable graphics)
IDT High Definition Audio CODEC
4GB RAM
Win7 X64

Not a powerhouse, I know, but it seems to me that the game should run quite a bit better than it does even on my hardware.

Given it's an alpha build it is rather heavy on ram even sitting around doing nothing (fresh game at the beach, nothing done, 1.6gb). I'm assuming you might have a fair few processes running in the background as well and who knows how near your 4gb that takes you which would put strain on it, as well as it seems to enjoy switching between one and two cores at the moment. Also as it's a laptop, you are playing this without any special profiles enabled for power saving or the like yes? Perhaps go through the default settings for your graphics adapter and power saving options, as well as checking through task manager which processes are running that you don't strictly need whilst gaming.

After all that have a look and see what your framerate gets to, if no change We'll need to assume that it's something about your build at the moment that the game doesn't like, but all that will eventually get cleared up and when that happens your pc should meet the requirements safely.

Thank you for your suggestions. I followed all of them, and also lowered the resolution to 1366x768. Even on the lowest settings, however, I still only get ~25fps at most. I know it's alpha, so I'm not worried, but I just thought I'd include my information in case it proves useful during optimization

Yeah, not surprised. That GPU is roughly 15% of the performance of mine, which isn't even bleeding edge at this point. To put it in perspective, that card performs about 10% better than the one that came in my gaming laptop made in 2007. I wouldn't expect much even after optimizations. However, make sure you are plugged in and running in high performance mode, otherwise the game may be using your integrated graphics rather than the GPU.

I know it's an anaemic card, but it runs games like War Thunder, FFXIV: ARR, Natural Selection 2, Eve Online, S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky, etc. etc. tolerably well, and I would wager that they are all more demanding than Original Sin, which to my eyes is just a few steps up from, say, Path of Exile (which is easily max-able on my system).

Did you try running a GPU monitoring program to make sure the game is using your GPU and not the integrated graphics? I remember there was a fix in patch 1.0.87.0, "In multi GPU environments, prefer the fastest GPU". Perhaps there are still issues.

I've decided to throw some hardware at my performance problem and it went away. I plugged my old GTX570 into the second PCIe slot, in addition to the GTX670 I already have. Dedicated the 570 to PhysX, and am seeing a dramatic performance increase in all my games, including DOS. I'm up to around 70fps on Ultra settings (everything turned on), from around 28fps on Low settings (everything turned off).

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense actually. I'm not sure if DOS uses PhysX, but even if it does, the fps increase I got seems a bit disproportionate. Oh well, can't complain, the game runs really smoothly now. Not to mention all the other games I'm able to max out now. Sweet.

Just out of curiosity, what do you mean by "custom drivers", and how did you get your box to boot windows in 6 seconds, using Intel's rapid start?

To be honest, I didn't know that such programs existed lol Any recommendations?

I have my power management profile set to "high performance", and my Catalyst Control Center has the Original Sin executable set to "high performance" (i.e. discrete graphics) as well.

It doesn't.

GPU-Z is a helpful and free utility that will monitor it. Maybe it will shed some light on what is going on. Good luck.

I was actually surprised how good the alpha ran on my (pretty crappy) notebook

It's an
Intel i3 2.4Ghz
4GB RAM
AMD Radeon HD 5650M(obility) with 1GB (slightly overclocked)
Windows 8.1 with AMD Catalyst 13.9 driver

I get decent FPS in all areas (town is "worst" of course) with medium settings and Antialiasing, Bloom & Godrays turned on.

Defined decent.

Decent meaning no noticeable stuttering most of the time.
Outside of the town I get ~30fps, on the marketplace inside the town it's ~25fps, which is still quite ok.
Worst fps I get is the burning ship with ~17fps or so, but that was the only place that ran that bad.

Running on a 1366x768 resolution, forgot to add that, so no 1080p.

Yeah, I know, no super smooth 60fps, but on that old potato I mentioned above I was still surprised.

I wonder if part of my problem is that Dell don't seem to be updating the Catalyst driver regularly on their site. Is version "2012.0319.239.261" the same as yours?

@Windemere: Thanks!

Can you try to use Radeon Mobility tool to update the drivers?

Mine is a Dell notebook too, the Catalyst Control Center is version 2013.0830.1944.33589.
The problem is that under Windows 7 I cannot upgrade the driver (Dell doesn't provide upgrades and the official one results in a bluescreen upon installation). Under Windows 8 (and 8.1) however I can use the official driver with the above mentioned Radeon Mobility tool.

That being said, upgrading helps a little, especially with performance in newer games but it doesn't do wonders (for me, but my card is pretty old by now).

I'm not brave enough to try the Mobility tool, I'm afraid ^^ But the difference in drivers is the only thing I can think of to explain the discrepancy in performance between our two machines. Unless DOS simply doesn't like the 7970 right now :-/

EDIT: So I ran DOS with GPU-Z in the background, and guess what: GPU load on the 7570m is at 0% so it appears that even though EOCApp.exe is set to "High Performance" in the Catalyst Control Center, DOS is not using the discrete GPU. That explains a lot lol Question is, how would I fix that?

I'm not sure how is this is possible. Are you saying you managed to run the game on integrated GPU of your laptop?

Well, I'm impressed.

As for your question, lemme see: right click on the EoCApp.exe and press "Run using Radeon HD 7xxxM" Should be something like that.

Yep, it appears to be running on the Intel HD 4000, which explains why it runs so horribly even at the lowest settings. Unfortunately, there is no option in the right-click menu or properties dialogue for the game to use the 7570M---the only place I've ever been able to set this is from the Catalyst Control Center, and it has always worked with other games.

But it does not in case with DOS? Interesting.

Could you please remove current drivers you have installed (they are from dell, right?), download DriverSweeper and clean up the leftovers, and then install latest drivers with AMD Mobility Tool. Plug in power cable and set "High Performace mode" and try again to force the game to run on on your Radeon.

Seems like DOS cannot detect your 7570M. There is a chance it could be solved with new drivers but otherwise you will have to contact Larian support describing the problem.

It reminds me: http://forums.totalwar.com/showthre...se-my-graphics-card.-AMD-Radeon-HD-7670M

UPD:

Additional, you could try some tricks:

1. Enter the BIOS during laptop boot process and try to find an option related to "integrated/interal gpu/graphics". I haven't seen such on modern Dells but if you are lucky it may happen you can disable it in there.

2. Try to run some small application that for sure uses your Radeon. May be Windows Media Player? Something like that. And then start DOS. I remember a year or two ago it did trick for me i na similar case.

I'm not really comfortable with using anything but the official drivers---even if Dell doesn't see fit to update them. I think I will just report the issue to Larian instead, and hope that the issue is fixed leading up to release But thanks so much for your suggestions

Well, it may happen that you would need to (most likey) update drives anyway so...

In the Catalyst Control Center, try switching the D:OS executable to integrated graphics. If the performance drops (or the game just crashes trying to load), the 0% load on the discrete graphics could be a bug in GPU-Z. If the performance is the same, switch the setting back to high performance and see if that helps.
You could also try setting it to automatic, and see if the game picks the discrete graphics then, even though it doesn't appear to when it is specifically told to.

Performance was noticeable worse when set to "power saving", but I couldn't test automatic because there isn't a setting that facilitates this. It appears that once you have assigned a setting to an application from within CCC you don't have the option of reverting it to "unassigned."

So yeah, maybe it's a bug with GPU-Z after all... Although it picks up the load for other games just fine, so...

I just wanted to report that the game performs much better for me after the last update It's now very playable at med (but with high character models and textures) with anti-aliasing turned on.

Same here, could play on pretty much maxed out settings now. The user interface (in- and out of game) still feels sluggish though, but I suppose that's a separate problem.

I think it must be. I have it too.