Hello, I am having trouble getting this game to run smoothly on any other resolution than 640x480. Going any higher than that makes the game very slow. Before I proceed to play through the campaign mode I want to know if something can be done about this.

640x480 – Very smooth and enjoyable frame rate but looks too pixelated.
800x600 – Low and unstable fps, barely playable at all.
1024x768 – Extremely low and unstable fps (like 5-15 fps with semi periodic pauses)

Computer specs:
CPU i7 2600k @ 3,4 GHz
ATI Radeon HD 7870 (Do I have this problem because I have an ATI card? I hear that this game doesn't like ATI cards.)
8GB RAM
64-bit Windows 8 Pro

I tried lowering all the other options (lowest shadow quality, no environment mapping and no water translucency) but it does not seem to have any effect at all on the fps.

Software mode seems to have stable frame rate through all of the resolutions but it is locked at something like 20 fps (or it feels like it) and the sluggish mouse and scrolling on the map makes me nauseous just after 10 minutes.

Is there anything I can do to make the game run smoother on resolutions above 640x480 while using the .exe provided by the hardware acceleration patch/fix or somehow increase the frame rate in Software mode?

It's an issue with windows 8. As far as I've seen, win 8 is to fullscreen windows what win vista was to 8 bit colour modes. :(

I don't have a non-vm install of windows 8 available to play with to see if there's any workarounds, but the obvious one would be to stop using win 8. I've also sent an updated version of the patch to gog that might fix the problem. (Or might not, or might make things worse. Tis hard to say without win 8 hardware to test on. :/)

Damn, I just upgraded to Windows 8...

I am too lazy to install win7 for a single game so I'll stick with 640x480 . I will probably get used to the pixelated look of the game as I continue playing :). It is just that the game looks a lot better with the higher resolution options when I use software mode so I thought I ask if anything can be done to get the best of both worlds.


Do you know how long it will take for gog to allow us to download the updated the patch?

I have no idea when or if the new patch will be used. Quite possibly never, if it causes more problems than it solves.

It's possible another win 8 user will come up with a workaround in the meantime. That's part of the common advice to never use a microsoft operating system before the first service pack; the service pack might not actually fix anything, but at least all the common problems will be well known by then, hopefully with a list of workarounds. :p

Well, I got if “fixed”. I made a separate partition and installed Linux Mint on it and tested how well Wine plays DKII. It isn't quite as smooth as the hardware patch on 640x480 but it does allow me to play on higher resolutions with high enough fps.

It is surprisingly stable and only has very few minor graphical glitches with text in menus. Actually, in wine some creatures see the world through eyes with different colors when I possess them which is something I had forgotten about and doesn't happen in Windows.

So +1 for Wine and Linux! :D

Apparently they're using the new patch already, so the answer of whether it makes it better or worse is that it makes no difference whatsoever. :/ That definitely should have been fixed in the new patch though... along with the bumpmapping support and support for custom resolutions, it was one of the main things I wanted to get fixed... Do you get a crash if you use the commandline flags to turn on bumpmapping? If so, you might want to try and redownload the game.