Dungeon Siege 2 Broken World - Low framerate

[GothicIII]

So I am struggling on this for weeks now. I am talking about the expansion which is not officially available on steam: Dungeon Siege 2 - Broken World.

I debugged already the multiplayer issues and posted my findings on
https://github.com/GenesisFR/DS2TroubleshootingGuide/issues/2
So that's done and the fix is working. You can play with your friends without any network issues now (especially with duplicate name errors and hosted games unable to join/see).

Now I am struggling with low fps problems. No matter the settings the game runs like on a potato. In fights fps can even ditch below 10. This is getting really hard on the eyes.

This issue is somehow bound to hardware. AFAIK I can exclude any software since I prepared a portable Windows 11 with everything preinstalled. Out of 6 systems the game runs fine on 3. The ingame options/ini settings do not fix this.

Test hardware:
(Windows 11, on 1080p+, Testmap is just outside of the 1st druid village inside the 1st shrine, completely zoomed out with zoom far mod)

+AMD Razer 7 7800X3D on an x670E Asrock board with a RTX4090 (~140fps)
+Intel i5 12600k on an noname board with a RTX3060 (~90fps)
+Intel i7 7700k on an acer laptop with a RTX1050 (~60fps)
-Intel i7 13700k on a z790 MSI board with a RTX4090 (~22fps)
-Intel i7 12700k on a z690 MSI board with a GTX970 (~22fps)
-Qemu KVM with GTX970 passthrough (~15fps)

This is all booted from the same system drive without changing any settings across systems. Since all GPUs are Nvidia GPUs, the driver version is the same (536.40).
Btw this issue happens also on Windows XP with the original disc version.

List of things I can exclude:
-90% sure: BIOS settings like Virtualization Settings (Vt-x, VT-d and AMD equivalent) and many more
-GPU hardware (Intel onboard has the same issue)


I suspect that the .exe wastes CPU cycles on some hardware configurations but I am a debugging beginner so I struggle currently on debugging this properly.

Has anybody even a clue what is going on? Are there any other people out there that solved this somehow?

[marcew44]

I think you are out of luck if you already tried the virtualization trick, that's the only fix i've ever seen work for this issue.

[jjj0309]

I'm suffering the exact same issue as you, frame rates gradually tanks as I play the game. From 60+ to bellow 12 within few hours. My CPU is ancient Intel 6700, hope you can find solution soon.. Or else I'll just move over to AMD Ryzen this year, if Intel screw up 15th gen.

[LucasRCD]

Apparently you're right on the money about the game wasting CPU cycles when running on newer hardware. HOWEVER, that's exclusively a problem if you use Broken World.

Apparently nobody's bothered trying to find a specific fix for this issue, however, so everyone's just gonna be waiting for someone to make a mod that fixes this expansion pack-induced spaghetti code.