Beta 2.1.18

[badhabit]

The game has become completely unplayable in outside areas. In spots with some view distance moving takes a second per tile. Was working before. Any way to use older patches with the Steam version?

I also noticed a drop in performance while outdoors, i got an improvement by putting all the settings on high, running around for 15 seconds then switching it back to low. I also killed the steam overlay and that bought me maybe 5 fps.

Dunno if it helps, but you arent the only one to notice a performance change.

Do you have by any chance a AMD card? I noticed for my card that with LOG2 the GPU is not for every game start using the full clock speed (and throttles also not up later)... somehow it doesn't got detected as game/demanding application by the GPU driver. (But I saw it once jumping up by changing the GFX options...which could be the connection to your experience) You can check with GPU-Z & enforce the full clock speed via driver settings.

(PS: maybe you can add your performance (FPS, GPU/CPU load, clocks, screenshots) to the performance threads in the support section so that we can analyze this better e.g. viewtopic.php?f=21&t=7984 or this viewtopic.php?f=21&t=8091 viewtopic.php?f=21&t=7088)

[Thorham]

I assume you did not update any drivers.

No, I didn't. They were up to date already.

A quick list of your system (CPU, GPU, RAM, swapfile size) would help to estimate what performance you should see.

Cpu: Amd APU 3400.
Gpu: Amd Radeon HD 6450 1 gb.
Ram: 4 gb.
Swapfile size: 2 gb.
Os: WinXp pro 32 bit.

Quite low end, but the game was perfectly playable on this setup in 1280x720 with settings on low. Not very smooth in outside areas with some view distance, but perfectly playable non the less. Indoors (and any area/position where you can't see far) is still fine (and smooth).

Is the problem present in all outdoor areas; perhaps even from the start cage? What's your fps right there?
What fps do you see at one of the toughest spots in the game: enter Forgotten River from Twigroot Forest and look East.

Yes, it is. Fps is ridiculously low (<4), and everything is slow, it's not just low FPS. Takes a second to move to the next tile.

Hmmm... that's not completely as I remember it: as far as I remember you had a pretty high fizzle chance at first time usage of a spell (and even higher with higher strength runes) which got better by just training this specific spell by retrying, the chance got better. Even without a wizard/priest level gain in between... but maybe my memory is wrong here.

Characters don't learn spells. Their successful cast rate depends on their wizard level for wizard spells and priest level for priest spells. Higher wisdom stat helps for casting spells for which the level is too low, but isn't significant. Higher level spells require higher levels to cast consistently. Higher power levels also require higher levels.

I still play Dungeon Master with custom dungeons on my Amiga (currently doing the original Chaos Strikes Back), and this is really how it works.

[Dr.Disaster]

Cpu: Amd APU 3400.
Gpu: Amd Radeon HD 6450 1 gb.
Ram: 4 gb.
Swapfile size: 2 gb.
Os: WinXp pro 32 bit.

Quite low end, but the game was perfectly playable on this setup in 1280x720 with settings on low. Not very smooth in outside areas with some view distance, but perfectly playable non the less. Indoors (and any area/position where you can't see far) is still fine (and smooth).

Aye, it's not a race horse; the APU is a 2.7Ghz dual core matching an Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 and the Radeon HD 6450 matches an Intel HD 3000 chip.

I know those APU's always have a build-in GPU. If the info on the AMD site is correct the A4-3400 comes with an Radeon HD 6410D. Please check that the game is really run on the HD 6450 and not for some strange reason only on the build-in HD 6410D. Also make sure by looking into Windows Task Manager that LoG2 does in fact use both(!) your cores and not just one.

In addition it might be interesting to see the difference when the game runs on each Radeon or even in Crossfire mode (if possible, dunno, i'm not an AMD guy).

Now a suggestion. From my experience with WinXP i know that overall system performance degrades when a swapfile is activate. With your 4 gig's of RAM you should be fine to run pretty much everything so i'd deactivate the swapfile entirely.

Is the problem present in all outdoor areas; perhaps even from the start cage? What's your fps right there?
What fps do you see at one of the toughest spots in the game: enter Forgotten River from Twigroot Forest and look East.

Yes, it is. Fps is ridiculously low (<4), and everything is slow, it's not just low FPS. Takes a second to move to the next tile.

A general slowdown then. Maybe the game runs on the wrong GPU now, just on one core or XP does a lot of swapping now.

While checking - as stated above - that the game does use both your cores also check if any core is maxed out. Also a quick check on the GPU with GPU-Z might help iron out things.

[Thorham]

Please check that the game is really run on the HD 6450 and not for some strange reason only on the
build-in HD 6410D.

It is.

Also make sure by looking into Windows Task Manager that LoG2 does in fact use both(!) your cores and not just one.

It's not using both cores. CPU maxes out at 50%. That's not good.

In addition it might be interesting to see the difference when the game runs on each Radeon or even in Crossfire mode (if possible, dunno, i'm not an AMD guy).

Can't do that, unless I connect my main monitor to the mobo video connector, and using something like Crossfire sadly isn't supported with 32 bit WinXp.

Now a suggestion. From my experience with WinXP i know that overall system performance degrades when a swapfile is activate. With your 4 gig's of RAM you should be fine to run pretty much everything so i'd deactivate the swapfile entirely.

That only happens when the swap file is used. I can try, but I know 100% for sure it won't matter, and it didn't matter before.

Ah general slowdown then. Maybe the game runs on the wrong GPU now, just on one core or even XP does a lot of swapping now. While checking - as stated above - that the game does use both your cores also check if any core is maxed out. Also a quick check on the GPU with GPU-Z might help iron out things.

Swap file isn't used, the correct GPU is used, but only one CPU core is utilized. GPU-Z says the video card is almost fully utilized (video RAM speed is at 495 mhz out of 500, shouldn't matter).

[Dr.Disaster]

Also make sure by looking into Windows Task Manager that LoG2 does in fact use both(!) your cores and not just one.

It's not using both cores. CPU maxes out at 50%. That's not good.

Just to make this clear:
You have full activity on one core and no or very little activity on the other core?

Seems that's the problem then.
With the game running, right-click it's process "grimrock2.exe" in the list of processes and select "Set Affinity".
Make sure the game is allowed to use both cores.

If both cores are already allowed, try to "trick" the game to switch cores with the affinity setting (deny him the core it's running on now), click ok, wait a tad, then re-allow both cores.

[Isaac]

You can achieve smaller reaoltions via grimrock.cfg and windowed mode e.g. 800 x 600

Sure, but it wasn't necessary. And 800x600 My computer may be low end, but it plays Skyrim properly. Not in ultra, of course, but still. The game played fine until the patch.

Slow-downs for me seem to exist when there is a lot of crap processes running in the background. I usually disable these first, before playing. There is no reason to have Firefox holding 300,000 kb and running flash plugins while playing a fullscreen game; and no reason to allow one's antivirus to be doing full system scans while expecting top performance from the disk, and CPU.

...With the game running, right-click it's process "grimrock2.exe" in the list of processes and select "Set Affinity".
Make sure the game is allowed to use both cores.

If both cores are already allowed, try to "trick" the game to switch cores with the affinity setting (deny him the core it's running on now), click ok, wait a tad, then re-allow both cores.

To this day, I'm shocked that I've never found a way to set these options in a shortcut that just enables them at launch. Seems like a missing feature.

[Dr.Disaster]

...With the game running, right-click it's process "grimrock2.exe" in the list of processes and select "Set Affinity".
Make sure the game is allowed to use both cores.

If both cores are already allowed, try to "trick" the game to switch cores with the affinity setting (deny him the core it's running on now), click ok, wait a tad, then re-allow both cores.

To this day, I'm shocked that I've never found a way to set these options in a shortcut that just enables them at launch. Seems like a missing feature.

There is not shortcut option but you can expand the start command (see from middle of page downwards) to do this. The value to use behind the affinity keyword is a bit-matrix representing your cores i.e. 5 stands for cores 0 and 2.

[Nexus]

The game has become completely unplayable in outside areas. In spots with some view distance moving takes a second per tile. Was working before. Any way to use older patches with the Steam version?

I also noticed a drop in performance while outdoors, i got an improvement by putting all the settings on high, running around for 15 seconds then switching it back to low. I also killed the steam overlay and that bought me maybe 5 fps.

Dunno if it helps, but you arent the only one to notice a performance change.

Do you have by any chance a AMD card? I noticed for my card that with LOG2 the GPU is not for every game start using the full clock speed (and throttles also not up later)... somehow it doesn't got detected as game/demanding application by the GPU driver. (But I saw it once jumping up by changing the GFX options...which could be the connection to your experience) You can check with GPU-Z & enforce the full clock speed via driver settings.

(PS: maybe you can add your performance (FPS, GPU/CPU load, clocks, screenshots) to the performance threads in the support section so that we can analyze this better e.g. viewtopic.php?f=21&t=7984 or this viewtopic.php?f=21&t=8091 viewtopic.php?f=21&t=7088)

ATI Radeon HD4890. It's been running pretty consistantly at 80% (don't wanna go higher cause it runs kinda hot), both before and after the settings fiddle (and in the previous patches). So perhaps it may be the throttling, im installing cpu-z now and will test this hypothysis.

[Nexus]

Yes, without opening the entrance door. [...] The door out opened as normal.

I can confirm that I have also done it this way. Watch out with the spoilers though. Could it be that you completed the wrong puzzle to open the door or that you reset the right puzzle without noticing, Nexus?

Oh yeah update on this, after steam file verification, bug got fixed. So maybe in the patch I got a 1 where there should be a 0 and that was enough to break it. So as such I shall recind my prior statement.

[badhabit]

Also make sure by looking into Windows Task Manager that LoG2 does in fact use both(!) your cores and not just one.

It's not using both cores. CPU maxes out at 50%. That's not good.

More or less normal, as Petri confirmed that the engine is basically single threaded (despite recommending quad cores systems). The slightly higher maximum CPU utilization people saw with LoG2 (max around 1.7 cores) happened propably only due to GPU driver internal multi-threading.