Slowdown and crashes

[Calessa]

Kov -- you're running two displays.  Try disabling one?  Fixed it for me.

[Magus44]

Yeah, I had the menu slowdown/lag problem, but I disabled my secondary monitor and it's run perfectly for an hour now. Before it wouldnt last 15 mins.

For the record, my setup is:
Win 7-32bit.
Intel Celeron E3300 2.5Ghz
2GB Ram
Nvidia GeForce GTS250.

[pangya]

I've never encountered the menu lag problem, but I have the crashing problem.  I read you guys had a workaround for the menu lag by disabling your second monitor... I'm currently using three monitors with ATI Eyefinity.  I tried disabling all of mine but one yet I still encounter the crashing...

For any other people experiencing the door transition crashing, are you running multiple monitors?

[Narmy]

I've never encountered the menu lag problem, but I have the crashing problem.  I read you guys had a workaround for the menu lag by disabling your second monitor... I'm currently using three monitors with ATI Eyefinity.  I tried disabling all of mine but one yet I still encounter the crashing...

For any other people experiencing the door transition crashing, are you running multiple monitors?

I have a second monitor plugged in (well, a TV actually), but it's been disabled the whole time.

[Dogi]

Disabling my secondary makes it better but the menus still lag after a bit of playing. It also somewhat defeats the purpose of having multiple monitors

Also you can set your vram to minimal while having fullscreen selected and then switching to another mode. It still greys out but it appears the choice for minimal is kept, that also helps out.

Also not directly related to game performance issues, but after killing the Vile Skeleton the girls did their victory pose and all of his coins vanished before they gave control back. Was disappointing.

[xfraze]

Hello.

I'm using an AMD Phenom x4 965 3.4GHz processor. I have 8 gigs of ram and windows 64bit. I have two Radeon HD 5770 in crossfire configuration.

I'm not sure if this helps or not, but when I went to the task manager and found the sotes.exe process and set the affinity to to just one core (0), I noticed an immediate improvement in the interface response time.

The issue is still there, but it seems to occur a lot slower.

[Desuwa]

Looks like there are three separate issues. A menu (possibly general) slowdown problem for users of multiple monitors, such as myself, that is fixed by playing with only one monitor enabled.

A crashing bug when transitioning areas with no known cause or workaround yet, which I am not personally experiencing, though I have two machines to test it on and I've only played on one so far.

Also I think there are some small memory leaks, if I watch the game in task manager it will slowly use more and more memory, though it's not causing any issues for me.


Since there's been one guy who said he used three monitors with Eyefinity without the slowdown I'd hazard the guess that the game engine just wasn't built to accommodate multiple monitors and is doing something very silly with overlays.

I did a little experimenting, and it appears that duplicating the display on two monitors, as opposed to extending the desktop, doesn't cause the menu problems. I haven't done a lot of testing, since I don't have a lot of time today, but maybe someone else can try this and post their results. Also it appeared from a very short test, too short to be conclusive, that I could start the game with only one active display, then switch to extended desktop mode - the mode that I suspect is the reason for everyone's problems - and not have the problems. If more people can confirm this then it's probably a problem during initialization.

[xfraze]

I changed my screen settings to only one monitor instead of using 2 and I have not encountered any menu slow down. I've been playing for about 20 min or so. I disregarded my suggestion on changing the affinity settings when I performed this test.

[Trace]

I was encountering the Transition Screen Crash on my Win7 64 bit PC, I ran the client in Win XP (SP2) compatibility mode and I haven't encountered the crash again.

[sibilla6]

I have the Menu lag and I'm also a dual monitor user. I haven't tested on a single one yet but it seems to be a clear pattern now.

[SilentCaay]

I have a dual monitor setup on Win XP which I have configured with ATI's Catalyst Control Center/Hydravision. I don't have any menu slowdown with the full version, though I did have some with the demo. I haven't had a single crash, either. It must be a particular type of multi-monitor setup that causes it.

[Desuwa]

Well so much for doing work today...

Anyway, after a few about two hours of playing, it's enough for me to start the game with only one monitor, and then switch back to two. I haven't had any slowdowns in menus since I started it up with only one monitor even though I've had both monitors on while playing.

[pangya]

I was encountering the Transition Screen Crash on my Win7 64 bit PC, I ran the client in Win XP (SP2) compatibility mode and I haven't encountered the crash again.

This seems to lessen the crashes a bit, but it is definitely still there.

[PeaCake]

I'm encountering the transition crashes, which while few, are resulting in unplayability due to the inability to save in between. I'll post my system specs, if you'd like me to do any tests or get any more info, just tell me.

These crashes occur regardless of game size (Fullscreen, Windowed, or Zoom Mode). Graphics settings are on High & VRAM is on Normal.

System specs:
Windows XP SP3 x86
Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 2.80 GHz
4GB of RAM (3328 MB usable due to 32-bit OS)
Palit nVidia GeForce 9600 GSO 512

[iviv]

Multi-monitor setup here, when playing fullscreen I also get the menu lag, but windowed mode it plays fine. Ran with task manager open with the game in fullscreen, the game seems to normally sit around 5-10% usage and it showed sotes.exe hitting 17% CPU usage when navigating menus. With six cores, this shows that its maxing out one core, and I assume its completely single threaded, meaning that its unable to use other cores, so its basically becoming CPU limited.
In windowed mode, its at 0% most of the time, rising to around 15% or so when navigating menus.

These were all tested using my AMD X6 1050T overclocked to 3.5Ghz


Edit: Scratch that, slowdown does happen in windowed mode too, though it takes longer for it to happen. This slowdown eventually affected everything, not just menus, and the CPU usage was sitting at 17%.