Divinity 2 on a GTX480 -> ugh!

My old 8800GTX melted/fizzled and I decided to bite the bullet and go for a card which could also serve as a heater for my icy room

Sadly the performance under the GTX480 - supposedly (on average ;-) the fastest single GPU solution avalable - is as bad as my 8800GTX. There are now also odd blocky shadow artifacts (looks like the shadow is very coarsely sampled, regardless of quality setting). I understand if the game is CPU limited (is it?) upgrading my card should not have made much difference…but the rendering quality has taken a knock and its is less smooth than it was before. I have a Nvidia GTX275 at work and that is much much smoother (of course, that system has a quad-core CPU, while my home one has a Core2 Duo 2.6, but multi-threading in game engines is still not widely used so I'd be surprised if that was the reason) … but even if nothing is streaming from the HDD, the game is still jerky. I suppose I may have some legacy driver issues, but all my other games are fine. I have 4GB of memory and I'm running Windows 7 x64. Any ideas? In the past I upped the process priority of the game exe (by one notch) , but that often led to a crash on exit, and that is not helping as much as it used to.

Turning off the shadows should have the highest priority, imho.

And apply the patch, if you have it.

I played the game with the lowest resolution, by the way, or only 1 step over that. After turning quite a lot of things off or down, I got a relatively smooth performance on my 8600 GT.

Sounds very strange, I've had no problems running the game on either a GF9800GTX or an ATI 5870.

Thanks for the reponses -

@Alrik - it is def smoother if I turn off shadows, but I was able to have them on and have decent(ish) perf under a card 2 gens older

@Maylander - yes, something is def odd, it maybe a driver conflict…I just pulled out the old 8800 and slapped in (mor or less) the new GTX480. I have the latest drivers, but perf seems way below par given the power of this card (compared to the old one) and those wierd blocky shadows suggest something really is screwed. Maybe when the game installs its sets some wierd config stuff which means replacing the card confuses it? The sahdows are maxed, buit what I'm seeings looks like a really downsampled shadomap. I must admit I have not tried reinstalling it (I got fed up with some dragon fight late in teh game and left it at that point :0 ) - I think I will try that next.

Any idea if I'll need to purge anything from the registry by hand?

Have you already tried posting it on the official forums ?

I just pulled out the old 8800 and slapped in (mor or less) the new GTX480.

It's always best to do a "fresh install" when upgrading GPUs(regardless of brand)… I don't believe it is truly free anymore, but I have been using driver cleaner pro for ages now - originally downloaded it back when it was still distributed as shareware by the dev… Not to worry though, from what I've seen driver sweeper is a perfect substitute, I'll probably try it out next time I need to upgrade my drivers.

Anyway here's a link to driver sweeper - latest version 2.1.0 :

http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/

Oh and if for whatever reason the above doesn't work well a quick google search for driver cleaner pro 1.5 still turns up a few sites(AfterDawn for one) where it can be downloaded for free.

-Another thought for others who may be reading this thread and think their drivers are outdated-

FWIW, I only recommend updating drivers as needed. Older cards will typically see little to no improvement with newer drivers and often times actually wind up losing performance or are flat out buggy(more so in older titles).