A modder called Kaldaien has uncovered a way to dramatically improve the performance of Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire.
More information.[Special K] Fix for Inverse CPU Performance Scaling
Intro
- I have determined one cause of extreme performance problems for systems with higher-end CPUs.
- The game spawns one worker thread per-CPU core (logical, not physical), and does not assign thread priority. This causes starvation and the result can be a very substantial decrease in framerate.
Download and Install
- My system goes from 24 FPS to over 100 at 4K after artificially decreasing my CPU's core count from 16 down to 3.
- Grab a specially prepared version of Special K from here[github.com]
Configuration
- Extract the DLL and PDB (optional debug info) to your Pillars of Eternity 2 install directory
- Press Ctrl + Shift + Backspace in-game, then expand the "Advanced" section of the Framerate Limiter settings.
- Enable "CPU Core Spoofing" and cut the number of CPU cores in half.
- Restart the game and test framerate
Misc. Performance Advice
- You may try reducing the number of cores even farther if framerate is stable.
- Hitching may occur while panning the camera if core count is reduced too far.
- If you are having GPU performance issues, Ambient Occlusion is the most poorly optimized graphical effect in the game. Dynamic Lights also have a modest impact on performance.
[…]
- These are the first things you should try turning off if using a lower-end GPU.