Subpar performance on solid system

Discussion in 'Bugs' started by yellowblanka, Jun 10, 2012.

  1. yellowblanka

    yellowblanka Member

    My specs:

    Core i7 2600K @3.4 Ghz
    8GB RAM
    EVGA GeForce GTX 460 Superclocked
    Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit

    I bought this game the other day on Steam, and while I've been having fun ,the performance is very uneven: at its best the scrolling is somewhat skippy. When there are more than a few objects on screen it can be quite noticable - it's not unplayable, and being a turn-based game, FPS of course is not nearly as important, but I see no reason the scrolling should be so skippy/laggy on my system. I have the latest drivers for all the components in my system, latest BIOS, have verified the integrity of the game files, and this game is the only game I have had performance problems with - all my other games perform as expected. If you open the crafting window or enlarge the mini-map one tick too high it's especially slow and laggy. I have tried OpenGL and DirectX modes - OpenGL did nothing, and DirectX mitigated it to small degree, however I'm still seeing a constant stutter and noticably laggy scrolling with more than a handful of objects on screen. I had tested my RAM recently, no problems there, and my temperatures check out ok, are there any command line options I'm unaware of? Thank you in advance for any help.
     
  2. LionsDen

    LionsDen Member

    I think everyone is having these types of problems. I know I do and my system isn't anywhere near as good as yours.

    Part of the problem is the procs, either Fax or Essence created a mod that has a fire that jumps from corpse to corpse and even monster to monster (I think about the monsters anyway) and heard that if used on a good monster zoo it can take 10 minutes for all of the animation and other things to finish. This is probably something that is being looked at (I don't know for sure as I haven't heard anything) so it may be addressed with a future patch. I do however still find the game quite playable. I haven't played with the wildfire so I haven't seen it in action but it sounds like a cool little thing to see. All that said, with my own system being slower than yours, I'm not seeing a lot of slowdown, just the normal blips and blops while moving and opening doors. But then, I don't play with many mods and the more mods you have, I think the slower your system will become.
     
  3. SkyMuffin

    SkyMuffin Member

    That is really strange. I've run Dredmor on two computers with (much) worse stats than yours, and they do it just fine. It must be related to the specific hardware and compatibility with it.
     
  4. yellowblanka

    yellowblanka Member

    It should be noted that I am not using any mods, this is vanilla Dredmor (+ the expansion) with the latest patches. I initially placed it in the "indie game, not terribly well funded/optimized" camp, but I thought I'd ask here anyway. As I've said, every other game/application works as expected, have had no weird global slowdown on my system or anything, so it has to be some issue specific to this game (perhaps an issue with the libraries this game uses and the 4-series of cards). Again, thank you for any enlightenment you can provide.
     
  5. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    We run using a pure software renderer for compatibility reasons; ergo, we are mainly limited by screen resolution. What resolution are you playing at?
     
  6. delta534

    delta534 Member

    It might be some other program running like your anti-virus or that the default animation speed feels to slow. Try hitting = once after the character loads on your next play through and see if that makes a difference.
     
  7. yellowblanka

    yellowblanka Member

    1920x1080, the native resolution of my monitor.
     
  8. yellowblanka

    yellowblanka Member

    Yeah, your character definitely has a somewhat deliberate pace, but this is a very obvious and noticeable chop and/or stutter when the screen scrolls, and the game is nearly unbearably choppy when I increase the mini-map to its maximum size. I've checked the CPU usage and it's fairly low when the game is running, and as I've said, I have no other issues with any other application or game on my system, it's still running as fast as the day it was built. I also use a Kingston 64GB SSD in a cache setup using Intel Rapid Storage Technology if that helps.
     
  9. delta534

    delta534 Member

    Try turning off smooth scrolling or dropping the resolution down a size or two. If that does not help, then it is some obscure setting on your system that does not play well with DoD.
     
  10. yellowblanka

    yellowblanka Member

    "Smooth Scaling"? Yeah, disabled that, it had no effect, dropping the resolution a bit did have some effect though it still wasn't uniformly smooth.
     
  11. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    As said above, Software Rendering. That means everything is done on the CPU instead of being spread between the CPU and GPU.
    The game does use multiple cores, but it really sticks 3/4 of the work on a single core. Thus anytime there are things happening it is laggy and it shows. Nothing can really be done about it at current though.
     
  12. mining

    mining Member

    My setup is pretty similar - i7-860, 6gb RAM, HD-5870 (or something) and Win7 - I'd suggest that you try windowed mode, running as admin if you aren't already and possibly also post a video if you can fraps it or something so we can see whats going on.
     
  13. yellowblanka

    yellowblanka Member

    I've tried running in windowed mode, disabling aero via the shortcut etc. - still getting quite a bit of skipping/chugging. I understand that a software rendering engine puts more strain on the CPU (I remember playing early 3D games using software renderers and most were abysmally slow), however I'm not seeing much load on my CPU when I run in windowed and check CPU usage, and yet I'm still getting this janky, uneven (even at the beginning of a game, though it gets worse in rooms with more than a few objects) scrolling. I don't understand it as the sprites/characters etc. are comparatively simple with relatively few frames of animation. I had hoped updating to the latest drivers would fix it, but no dice, and I don't really feel like downgrading to relatively ancient drivers for this one game when everything else works as expected. I might see if I can do a video capture sometime. Thanks in advance for the help. The game is a lot of fun, I just wish I could resolve this problem that is hindering my enjoyment of the game.
     
  14. Gozer

    Gozer Member

    Bump

    I'm having this exact same issue.

    In 1920x1080 the frame rate drops around 45-50 fps when I'm around a few items. Bringing down the resolution to 1280x800 keeps it at a stable 60fps.

    I couldn't get an fps readout with fraps until I applied the -opengl in the launch options. At that point fraps confirmed my suspicions of a frame rate issue. I'm pretty sure using the -opengl launch option actually helped the frame rate a bit as well.

    My specs are:

    i7 950 @ 3.1GHz
    GTX 480 using 301.42
    6GB DDR3
    Win 7 64
     
  15. FaytesEnd

    FaytesEnd Member

    Was there ever a resolution for this? I also have an I7 @3.2 Ghz and this is one of the few games that chug really bad on full screen @ 1920x1080 resolution.

    i7 960 3.2 ghz
    16 gigs of ddr 3 memory
    160 gig ssd drive
    win7 64bit pro