[Performance] Should I be able to play this game?

[mk6ve]

Hi everyone,

 

I just started Deadfire and I'm getting ~20 FPS just walking around on the first island. The first fight itself was much worse, and even the inventory is annoyingly unresponsive.

 

Now, admittedly, I'm running it on a not-very-high end laptop: ThinkPad T440p with i5-4330M, GeForce 730M GT and 12 GB RAM (at 1920x1080). Then again, it is an isometric RPG that was supposed to run similarly to the first game, which worked just fine.

 

I saw the pinned thread, but that procedure did not really help much - and anyway, it seems like it's aimed at people who aren't getting as much performance as they should out of their gaming rigs and not necessarily those who effectively cannot play the game.

 

So has anyone managed to get a stable ~30 fps with a lower-end PC? Is there anything more I can do other than massively decrease resolution (not really an option since the text is barely legible then)? Can I expect some sort of patches on the way, or is this it?

 

I backed both Pillars games and this is a major letdown. Of course, I can't expect it to run on any POS computer I find at the scrap heap, but it's still an old-school isometric RPG so it boggles my mind that it would be doing this bad.

[Wormerine]

If you encounter troubles on the opening isle then I must warn you that there are areas in the game which work much much worse. 

 

I have:
i7-4720HQ

GTX960M

8 GB of ram

 

For me barely anything worked, but turning off shadow casting did bring it to a playable performance but I still encounter major slows down in some of the areas - the worst offender being Seeker, Slayer, Survivor area. 

 

It is an isometric game but it is not only characters and passive 2d background. There is a lot going visually - like light being cast on enviroment, that takes some power to calculate. It is not surprising it has higher requirements, however, the game doesn't seem to have major performance issue. As discussed here:

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/107672-extreme-drop-in-performance-out-of-ideas/

even high end machine struggle with Deadfire, especially after 4.0 patch.

I really hope Obsidian will address this, and I am pondering on buying a decent PC, but it seems that even a stronger machine might struggle to provide enjoyable Deadfire experience. 

Edited January 21, 2019 by Wormerine

[house2fly]

The text is perfectly legible at lower resolutions, I played the whole game beginning to end at 720p with no real problems. You might just need to get used to it

[mk6ve]

If you encounter troubles on the opening isle then I must warn you that there are areas in the game which work much much worse. 

 

I have:

i7-4720HQ

GTX960M

8 GB of ram

 

For me barely anything worked, but turning off shadow casting did bring it to a playable performance but I still encounter major slows down in some of the areas - the worst offender being Seeker, Slayer, Survivor area.

 

Oof, that's tough.

 

It is an isometric game but it is not only characters and passive 2d background. There is a lot going visually - like light being cast on enviroment, that takes some power to calculate. It is not surprising it has higher requirements, however, the game doesn't seem to have major performance issue. As discussed here:

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/107672-extreme-drop-in-performance-out-of-ideas/

even high end machine struggle with Deadfire, especially after 4.0 patch.

 

Yeah, but I'd expect to be able to turn down model details and lighting effects far enough to be able to play the game on any relatively modern PC. I find it weird that Obsidian would sacrifice playability at the altar of eye candy, and then not let players do anything about it. Especially seeing how good Infinity Engine games with their static 2D backgrounds look even nowadays when stuck with a hi-res mod.

 

I hope something changes in future patches, I really thought I was on the safe side here and I don't fancy buying a new PC just to play the game.

 

The text is perfectly legible at lower resolutions, I played the whole game beginning to end at 720p with no real problems. You might just need to get used to it

 

What kind of screen do you have? At 720p the text is really bad on mine (1080p). Which is weird, I played Torment on this at 800x600 and it was perfectly fine. Did you have to tweak it in any way? I'll try playing around with resolution some more.

[SChin]

Hey everyone,

 

Sorry for the performance issues some of you are having.  BMac is hard at work doing what he can to improve performance where he can, including the 4.0 issues.  The Programming team ended up adding in a lot of graphical options including lighting, shading, ambient occlusion, etc. to give people the option to turn them on or off to help performance.  For the font, there is also a Font Scaling option that lets people increase most UI text to 130% if needed.

 

I apologize that there are still performance issues for you folks and continue to hope we can get some more fixes as well as some support from Nvidia to resolve these problems.

 

Thanks for reaching out to us about these issues everyone!

[mk6ve]

Hey everyone,

 

Sorry for the performance issues some of you are having.  BMac is hard at work doing what he can to improve performance where he can, including the 4.0 issues.  The Programming team ended up adding in a lot of graphical options including lighting, shading, ambient occlusion, etc. to give people the option to turn them on or off to help performance.  For the font, there is also a Font Scaling option that lets people increase most UI text to 130% if needed.

 

I apologize that there are still performance issues for you folks and continue to hope we can get some more fixes as well as some support from Nvidia to resolve these problems.

 

Thanks for reaching out to us about these issues everyone!

 

After the very latest update plus an update of Nvidia drivers I have to say that the game is playable in native resolution for me - not stellar, but definitely playable. I don't know which one made it so, but nonetheless thanks for still working on it!