Single Core?
 

I've read elsewhere that to get less stuttering in G3 I need to turn off the other cores on my machine. How exactly do I do this? I used to know how with earlier systems but I don't see an option when I go to my nVidia panel in Windows 7 Home Premium. I have an i7 950 Pentium. Thanks very much.

No need to do it. Multicore support is already disabled in the later Community Patches.

Yes, multicore support was removed with the last official patch v1.6 that was made by Spellbound (the makers of ArcaniA). The community patches v1.7x are all based on that final official patch so multicore support is disabled on all versions post v1.6.

Thanks, Gorath and Moriendor for your quick responses. One or two quick questions… Do I need to put the 'ultra ini' file (Ge3.ini) somewhere else - other than *just* in the main ini folder inside Gothic III? I thought I read that somewhere. And if so, where would that be? Also, in my ultra ini file somewhere near the top, it says:
Right=1680
Bottom=1050
Does it matter that I'm playing the game in 1920 x 1200?
The game stutters quite a bit especially for my machine, which I think should more than handle it. Do you have any pointers as to what might be adjusted, so that it still looks good, but also will run pretty smoothly (either in the Ge3 ini file or in the main 'in-game' menu)? Oh, and the sound tends to clip (cut out and then back on) when I'm close to water, especially waterfalls - kind of annoying.
Specs: Windows 7 64, Pentium i7 950 @ 3.07GHz, 9 gigs Ram, nVidia 285 GTX, plenty of HD space. Thanks a lot for your help!

There is only one "ge3.ini" and that one is inside the \gothic 3\ini folder. You just need to overwrite that file with the ultra ini.

Yes, that matters a whole lot in terms of image quality :) . If your native resolution is 1920x1200 then you definitely want to change that line to 1920x1200 or you can also just use the in-game options to change your resolution, of course.

I just reinstalled Gothic 3 (Steam version), installed the 1.74 community patch and applied the PCGH ultra ini to see for myself what performance of Gothic 3 is like these days on a machine like mine.
I got a Core i5-2500K @ 4.2GHz, 8GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 570 GTX (800MHz Core/2000MHz Memory) with the latest official WHQL driver and a Crucial m4 256GB SSD. Like you I was playing at 1920 x 1200 resolution.

With that config I was getting quite a bit of stuttering as well. I tried changing a few settings (didn't want to reduce quality though) but nothing made much of a difference. With Vsync disabled I was getting up to 90 fps at times and on average the game seemed to run at 40 - 80 fps. Then it dropped to single digit fps and started to stutter in random places. It's almost exactly as I remember it from a few years ago :) . The engine is just broken and trying to stream way more data than even high performance rigs can handle.
I'm afraid that we just need to live with it as long as we want to play the game on ultra detail.

I just googled that issue and it seems like changing the ini entry "Entity.ROI=xxxx" back to 4000 might fix it. If you are using the ultra ini then the value is probably set to 8000 at the moment. I haven't tried this myself but if you have a save game near where you experienced the sound issues then it might be worth a try.

@Moriender…
I wrote:
Oh, and the sound tends to clip (cut out and then back on) when I'm close to water, especially waterfalls - kind of annoying.
Specs: Windows 7 64, Pentium i7 950 @ 3.07GHz, 9 gigs Ram, nVidia 285 GTX, plenty of HD space. Thanks a lot for your help!

You Responded:
I just googled that issue and it seems like changing the ini entry "Entity.ROI=xxxx" back to 4000 might fix it. If you are using the ultra ini then the value is probably set to 8000 at the moment. I haven't tried this myself but if you have a save game near where you experienced the sound issues then it might be worth a try.

Thanks, that seemed to fix the problem… mostly. Much better, though. My problem now is why is it when I 'sneak', the whole screen shakes? Never did that before. I think I can live with that, I was always getting into trouble from sneaking around, anyway. I wonder why it is I can just walk up to someone's chest, (no sneaking) open it up, take everything out and not get in trouble for it. Maybe sometimes they get uptight, but not often. Anyway, I turned a few 'details' down just a bit and things still look really good and play pretty smooth (well, at least smooth for G3). This game is buggy, but I'm loving it so far! Thanks again for the help.

That's odd. Does it do that everywhere or just in certain places? If it is only in certain places then it could be an issue of clipping where your character model collides with the ground textures due to buggy behavior of the engine.
The game originally had massive clipping issues where enemies would attack you from underground or suddenly rise in front of you out of the ground or sometimes NPCs would fall through the floor to the bottom of the world mesh and all sorts of crazy bugs like that.

Yes, this features has unfortunately been dumbed down quite a bit from previous PB games. In Gothic 1 +2 (+NotR) you would consistently get in trouble for touching anyone else's property. In Gothic 3 it's a lot more inconsistent and in Risen it's outright silly at times where you can steal as much as you want from the palace of the town's law & order commander but you get in trouble when stealing an apple from a house in the harbor slums.

Personally, I find it unfortunate that PB does not recognize that this is one of the defining features of their games for many people. This is one of the features that the PB of today only considers as "nice to have" and that they might implement properly if there is enough time. I wish they would realize their own unique selling points like the "property awareness" of NPCs and build upon their strengths instead of following the trend to more generic, interchangeable RPGs. Oh well… /rant over and out ;)