Adventure Gamers - Forums

I spent over an hour trying to get this game to run properly last night—ended up posting on their support forums out of sheer frustration. The annoying thing is, the game occasionally runs perfectly. I’ve had a few plays where the FPS hasn’t dropped below 30, then I’ll come back to it a few days later and the framerate will tank to below 10FPS, *in the same area*. Right now I’m in the therapist’s office…one time it ran smoothly, but now every time I boot the game it runs below 10FPS.

If I can run The Witcher 3 at 40-45FPS with no issues, I shouldn’t have to worry about Dreamfall Chapters. I know Unity isn’t extremely well optimised but man, something is not right here. Ruining the game for me.

I was having similar problems, but it turned out the be caused by a bitcoin miner that was working my GPU.

Ah ok. Well I’ve tried turning off every other program, and the poor performance doesn’t extend to any other game so I don’t think it’s some kind of background process. It has to be a DFC-specific issue, but I have no idea what’s causing it.

Has it been confirmed that the PC build will be upgraded to Unity 5? I don’t mind waiting if it means I can play the game properly.

I think it has, but I get the feeling they’re not going to do it until after the series is done.

Just to be safe, though, you should download GPU-Z. After running Dreamfall with poor performance, exit and run GPU-Z and see what your system is idling at, usage and temperature-wise.

Orient, I had similar problems in Book 3. Lowering the game’s resolution seemed to fix it, but because the issue had been erratic I’m not sure if it really fixed it or if the problem just stopped happening. I had already been playing at low quality with the spiffy graphics options turned off.

Well, I’m finished with the episode but also finished with the game until the full release. It ran perfectly now but stuff like completely botching the decisions I made in the last episode and feeling like a short filler episode is making me want to wait. Also the gap between episodes and being years since I played the other games is making me have a hard time following the story sometimes so I’ll just replay TLJ and Dreamfall and hopefully by the time I get to it the game will be finished.

Frogacuda - 02 August 2015 07:43 AM

Just to be safe, though, you should download GPU-Z. After running Dreamfall with poor performance, exit and run GPU-Z and see what your system is idling at, usage and temperature-wise.

Cool, I’ll give that a go. I did try and flip between DFC and Task Manager, and the highest I seen my CPU usage at was 51%.

Iznogood - 02 August 2015 09:32 AM

Not to mention, that if you can run Witcher 3 without any problems, then you really shouldn’t have these problems with DC. My own rig doesn’t even meet the minimum requirements for W3, yet the lowest framerate dip I had in DC was to about 17-18 FPS, and most areas are above 30 FPS.

That’s the bizarre thing—the performance in DFC is terrible, but I can instantly switch to playing The Witcher 3 and get 40-45 FPS on Ultra settings. I admit that I don’t have the best CPU (it’s an Intel i3 but one of the faster ones) so maybe it’s as simple as DFC not utilising my GPU at all and only using 2 CPU cores, but if that’s the case, why has it ran smoothly before? Argh!

fov - 02 August 2015 12:28 PM

Orient, I had similar problems in Book 3. Lowering the game’s resolution seemed to fix it, but because the issue had been erratic I’m not sure if it really fixed it or if the problem just stopped happening.

For me, changing the graphics settings makes very little difference. The difference between ‘Awesome’ settings with everything turned on, to ‘Low’ settings with everything turned off is about 6-7 FPS.

So I downloaded GPU-Z and monitored the output while playing DFC. I’m no expert, but it doesn’t seem like this game should be using 99% of my GPU Load, and the Bus Interface Load sits at 84%.

By comparison, The Witcher 3 uses 95% of my GPU Load and only 33% Bus Interface Load, but I can tell it taxes my machine a lot more because of temperature/fan speed. My fan doesn’t even turn on playing Dreamfall.

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Anecdotal evidence suggests the move to Unity 5 is actually very quick and painless, and probably wouldn’t derail things much if all they wanted to do was port it straight.

However, with a new engine comes new features and if they want to actually tweak the game to really take advantage of that, I’m sure they’d have to spend some time with it.

orient - 06 August 2015 05:49 AM

So I downloaded GPU-Z and monitored the output while playing DFC. I’m no expert, but it doesn’t seem like this game should be using 99% of my GPU Load, and the Bus Interface Load sits at 84%.

By comparison, The Witcher 3 uses 95% of my GPU Load and only 33% Bus Interface Load, but I can tell it taxes my machine a lot more because of temperature/fan speed. My fan doesn’t even turn on playing Dreamfall.

Hmmm… I mean your system is not too far off from mine (an older i5 and a GeForce 770), and I get adequate performance (35 at the low end, usually around 50). Which is low compared to what I get in most modern games, but hardly problematic.

It could be the CPU thing, I have an overclocked Sandy Bridge which might outpace an i3, but I’d also comb through your Graphics settings in Windows and see if you have anisotropic filtering dialed up or something that might be pushing your fill rate to its limits (FXAA could be a culprit as well, perhaps. Dreamfall uses some other AA method that doesn’t seem very taxing, but if you override that, it could be a problem).

Yeah, I suppose the testing alone would probably be a few weeks, even if everything major worked.