Flames of Vengeance (Divinity 2) technical question

[frozentundra123456]

HI all,

I am having a performance problem with this expansion. I have a rather low end system, E4500, 9800GT, 3GB ram and Vista 32 bit. However, this is well above the specs for the game.

When I load the game, it runs fine at high graphical settings. However, after finishing a quest or some other dialogue, or levelling up and going back into the game, the game sometimes slows down dramatically to the point that it is almost a slideshow. Sometimes, but not usually, the performance will return to "normal" after a period of time. Most of the time, however, I have to exit to windows and reload the game. This will restore the performance. Lowering the graphics settings does not solve this problem at all and makes the game look terrible. I did have this problem in the original game, but very rarely. It is happening so often now that the game is very frustrating to play technically ( not to mention that I would give anything for quest markers.)

Anyone have any ideas what is happening and is there any kind of solution?? Has anyone else had this problem?? BTW, I am running the Steam version of the game.

 

[digitaldurandal]

Are you running some specific anti virus? Do you possibly have a hard drive that is on the fritz?

 

[Qbah]

I have never experienced anything like this in either the base game or the expansion. There was one place only the game dropped under 60FPS for me (actually under 30, I could really feel the game slow down), besides that it was buttery smooth.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Are you running some specific anti virus? Do you possibly have a hard drive that is on the fritz?

I am running Microsoft Security Essentials and Ad-Aware antispyware. Will try turning them off.

Unfortunately, I am suspicious about my HDD, even though it is only about 1 year old after already replacing the original. Sometimes I do get very slow response when opening windows explorer, then it is OK when I do it again.

 

[digitaldurandal]

If you have a "green" hard drive it may be going into a rest mode and take a few seconds to get back to speed.

I ask because I had similar issues before and found it happening especially when textures loaded in games, later i replaced my hard drive and the issues went away.

Try running a hard drive diagnostic. Many are available by the manufacturers.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Thanks for all the replies. I tried adjusting the graphics options again, and finally got it to run fairly well. I had to use medium preset and turned a few options back up to get a better looking game with decent performance. I still dont understand this though, as the original game ran without problems at high preset.

I may try to download a hard drive diagnostic since as I said sometimes the comp is slow to open programs and windows explorer.