Hi. I bought Divine Divinity a couple of days ago, and have attempted to play it, but it runs very slow and clunky. Moving around feels like I'm watching a turtle crawl to its death...IT'S REALLY SLOW!!
I should have no problem running the game, since it's from 2002, my OS is Vista...3GB of Ram, x2 Dual Core Processor 5600 + (2 CPUs), ~2.8GHz
Anyone..help?

Game Too Fast / FPS Limiter Universal: Stabilize the performance of your games


In the configuration program switch to Software mode rather than Direct3D.


Try talking to some of the NPCs.

You couldn't be more wrong. :) Divine Divinity has loads of charm, humour and interesting stories going on. You just need to explore a bit (and the game rewards exploration and roleplay). Agreed, the first town and dungeon can get a bit tedious, but that's like the first few chapters of the Lord of the Rings: get past it, and you're in for a very big treat. :)
I understand that based on your first impression, and with so many other games to play, you would discard it as a Diablo clone. But if you were to give this game a chance, you'd discover that it's much more than that. :)

Game runs perfectly for me under Win8.1x64....It has plenty of story, btw...but it requires actually playing the game to experience that...;)

A lot of thanks to Stuff for the solution. I had the same problem : the game was running too slow. Switching to software rendering did help.

I'm going to chime in about some slowness too, but of a diffrent kind : loading takes ages. The start menu, past the intro cinematic, takes, litteraly, a minute. Loading a saved games takes around 30 sec, but saving takes another whole minute.

It's not entirely unplayable of course, but as I've started the game just now, I don't see myself wandering in such a game where saving might be handful and loose entire minutes in just saving and reloading...

Otherwise, the game runs just fine so far, with a liiiiittle clunkyness when I get to the highest resolution. So it might be just that it's not just me ?

Thanks :)

Yes, I had the same problem. Use the configtool.exe to switch to software rendering. That should help.

Software mode seems to be the way to go these days.

For me both Software and Direct3D modes are super laggy to the point of being impossible to play, even the mouse pointer itself lags. I have a Dell Precision 5510 (i7-6820HQ, Quadro M1000M, Windows 10 Pro).

Setting the game to DirectDraw mode fixes it completely. Six years ago I made a simple tool to switch the game to unofficially supported DirectDraw or Glide modes, and it still works like a charm both with Steam and GOG versions.

As it is impossible to post links, I can only suggest to google for 'Divine Divinity Glide', and the first result leading to Vogons forum is what you need.

Another more tricky but also more versatile option is to use dgVoodoo. Note that, vice versa, DirectDraw mode is laggy with dgVoodoo, but Direct3D is not. With dgVoodoo you can use a borderless window mode with any in-game resolution scaled to whatever screen resolution you need. This is handy because it is difficult to pixel hunt keys and other small items in higher resolutions.

Thank you! The game was running like crap for me but your solution fixed it.

Of course, the way it ran was just as though I was back in 2002 running the system I had back then. But yeah nah LOL

This should be sticky, especially since it is related to technical issue.

Anyway, I was curious about old configuration program since I have two areas where sometimes my game slows down a bit, nothing huge and it is bareable you could say, but with the direct draw it is still the same.

In configuration program there is also an option to test Glide which I would prefer but once I click on test I get "initialisation of this mode failed".

I guess that I'm missing glide dll which should be in the game folder, I have put exe and dll of latest version of glide but there is the same message, maybe I need to use older version of glide, or maybe there is also sth else that should be provided with the configuration tool.

Question is, how do I use Glide/is it possible to use it.

Thank You

EDIT:

Well, it is possible to use glide, only thing is that my current PC is too old and with 2 gb of RAM and with windows 10,
no way I can run higher resolution with glide, only very small resolution.

Glide use ~500 mb of RAM more than e.g. software mode.

Anyway, since it seems it depends on performance of user PC, play with the settings in nglide_config.exe file, available in C:\Windows\System32 (here is where setup installs glide files - just google for glide, zeus software), in this case I could only set up the game up to 1024x768, if I set up even one resolution higher game wouldn't run, I guess that's the glide limit for this game.

OK, I know, this is not a suitable solution for everyone, but this idea wasn't posted before, so I have to do it:
Use linux.
No, I do not want to missionize anyone, but I had all the issues discribed in this forum... only on Windows 10. I installed DD via Gog Galaxy and it was stuttering slow. Load and save times were counted in minutes, not seconds. Terrible scratching sounds were played every time gold was dropped by an ork (or anyone else). The game crashed when I choose a resolution above 720.
I was thinking, if the whole thing works so badly under Windows, how would it look with a translation layer like Wine? So I started Lutris (a game manager for linux), selected Divine Divinity, pressed install, and a few minutes later the game was downloaded from gog and installed with all options set for Wine and the Direct3D/Vulkan translation.
Divine Divinity runs smooth a.f.
I'm playing now on FullHD with absolutly no stuttering, no matter how many characters are on screen. Load / Save times are down to something like 3 seconds. I had no sound issues while playing (3 hours so far since I installed DD on linux). It really seems like Wine is more compatible to WinXP than Windows 7, 8, 10.
So, once again, I don't want to missionize. I have a dual boot on my system because some of my workflows are faster on linux, but I understand it's not for everyone. This should only be seen as a description of my experiences of yesterday evening.

Can confirm. It performs much better under Linux + Wine.