Massive Slowdown during gameplay

Hi folks,

Got the game yesterday from beamdog, looks like it will pan out to be a fantastic game once I get this one last issue resolved.

So I have run the gamut on all the suggestions given, got the russian sound with english cutscenes in place. Using the 1.3 unofficial patch. Tweaked the .ini files as much as possible (making sure to change both the install and my documents .ini files.)

But what is happening is about 10-15 into the game, it will start to really slow down, especially during portions where npcs are fighting against each other, or when fighting Tagos in particular. The sounds will skip and the framerate hits the floor, where after a while of waiting for the game to respond it will come back up.

I have installed the game on two difference computers, one is a laptop with an ATI 5785 and a desktop with a Nvidia 9800 GTX, they are both running windows 7 64bit.

I haven't seen anyone comment on performance slowdown, so I thought I would throw this out there for some way to figure out how to resolve the problem. Thanks a lot!

I have the same problem, also got the game from Beamdog. I'm using a GTX 260 on Vista 64.

I've tried all kinds of INI settings, with and without patches, with and without Russian voices.

Most of the time when I enter combat (particularly with human enemies), the framerate drops to unplayable levels. It also happens sometimes when I'm just walking around. The framerate gets worse and worse until it just stops entirely with any music stuttering like mad. Sometimes it gets better after a while, but usually not.

The game runs very smoothly at all times other than these. If I can get to the menu while it's flipping out, the menu will be perfectly fine as well.

I don't know what to try at this point. The game grinding to a halt in combat 75% of the time makes it just a bit hard to play

I can confirm this also happens om my PC. I'm playing the GamersGate-version (1.1), patched with Wesp5's Unofficial patch (1.3). I've replaced the original English audio file with 'full' one. (The one that contains both the Russian and English sounds).

Edit - my system is as follows:

Intel Core I7 920 @ 2.8
Asus P6T Deluxe V2
12GB OZC Platinum, DDR3-1600 (7-7-7-20)
Sapphire ATI Radeon HD5870 Vapor-X, 1GB
Windows 7 Pro, X64

Could it be a memory leak? I've been playing the game for quite some time during the last days, and when I start the game, everything runs pretty well at a constant speed of 60 fps. (A bit lower during gun-intensive fights with bandits). After a while though, everythings slows down to a crawl during these fights. Quitting the game and then restarting only helps a bit, since the "Precursors.exe *32" process doesn't unload from memory. When I completely reset my machine however, everything runs pretty well once more.

When I alt-tab out of the game, I can see the "Precursors.exe *32" process slowly eating more memory.

I posted a thread that also contained the word "massive" and someone told me the game really dislikes ATI cards. Yours sounds to be running a bit better than mine, though.

Well, that can indeed be the case, since I haven't heard of Nvidia-users having problems. For me the slowdowns happen once these conditions are met:

- I've been playing for some time,
- I'm having a gunfight with raiders/bandits,
- The game is playing the the "death-animations" of these, at close range.

Once the enemies are dead, the game becomes more fluently once again, though then I often experience small 'hiccups'. All is well after I either restart my machine or close the game and terminate the process mentioned above manually.

I just got the game and was having the same problem (slowdown in combat). I tried some suggestions that came in the 1.4 unofficial patch and the game works great now.

This is what it says:
To fix graphic issues try in 'Shared Documents' ini/videooptions.ini
DISABLE_ROTATION_MOTION_BLUR=1, DISABLESHADERMODEL30=1, RENDERLAG=1,
SMOOTHFPS=1 and LIMITFPS=30. Restore weather with Weather Effects=1.

correction, I'm still getting massive slowdowns, just not All the time. It seems most common in jungle setting with high vegitation, and or lots of MOBs wanting to kill/eat me.

I switched the physics setting from fancy to simple but that didn't seem to change anything. If any other setting I change help I will report back.

I've reposted your post on the Beamdog forums, if you don't mind. A lot of people have bought it from them, and I'm guessing some have gotten the slowdown.

I told them that any feedback would be appreciated. I'd like to see if this would help me, but until I get some concrete answers I don't really want to re-download the whole 7 gigs.

I finally got the game working smoothly (other than a few minor hiccups).
First I did all the setting changes I described above then I went back into the enginesettings file and lowered any settings I could think of that wouldn't drastically alter the look of the game.

GrassRadius=0.400000 (from 1 I believe)
DISABLEDYNAMICSHADOWS=1
DISABLEWATERREFECTIONS=1


I may have changed more but going back those stuck out. GrassRadius is probably a big process killer so that probably helped a lot. I may go back and find a sweetspot between that and lowering grass density as having a visible floating cuttoff can be jarring. I hope that helps some.