Gothic 2 Performance issues:

[MatTheCat]

Hello all.

I have been a long standing fan of the Gothic series and have decided to go back to G2 NOTR and replay it but in German (to hone my language skills).

When I played through this game in the past, I put up with jumpy jerky performance with low visual distance settings as I had only an average machine for that period of time and considered Gothic 2 to demand hardware well ahead of its time.

Well today I have a high end gaming rig capable of maxing out most of the latest DX10 titles but the performance in G2 is utterly horrible.

Outdoors, I am getting around 20-25 FPS.

Considering the hardware that I now have wasn't even conceived off back when this game was released I am thinking that the performance problems has more to do with the way that Gothic 2 has been coded other than any hardware limitations.

Does anyone know of any fixes for this?

[Korianous]

The ZenGine is rather old, it has loads of quirks and isn't really good at handling the large amounts of activity prevalent in Gothic 2. Some .ini manipulation of the FPS and forcing a high quality render in marvin mode could perhaps help you.

Open up the Gothic.ini in the system folder, then go down to the section labeled [ENGINE]. Find ZMaxFPS and set the limit at whatever you wish it to be. Additionally, you could attempt to change some other values, such as enabling anti-aliaising, entering a custom refresh rate value, to improve visual quality, normally a dock on performance, but with your modern PC, may actually end up helping you.

[MatTheCat]

The ZenGine is rather old, it has loads of quirks and isn't really good at handling the large amounts of activity prevalent in Gothic 2. Some .ini manipulation of the FPS and forcing a high quality render in marvin mode could perhaps help you.

Open up the Gothic.ini in the system folder, then go down to the section labeled [ENGINE]. Find ZMaxFPS and set the limit at whatever you wish it to be. Additionally, you could attempt to change some other values, such as enabling anti-aliaising, entering a custom refresh rate value, to improve visual quality, normally a dock on performance, but with your modern PC, may actually end up helping you.

Forcing a high quality render in Marvin mode?

[Korianous]

Forcing a high quality render in Marvin mode?

first type bmarvinb
press F2 to bring up the console
type "zhighqualityrender" into the console window

[MatTheCat]

Vielen Dank!

I will give this a try.

[Korianous]

Vielen Dank!

I will give this a try.

Bitteschön! Good luck mate §wink.

[MatTheCat]

I quadruppled the figures set aside for memory allocation and now I have a Gothic 2 running as maxed out and as smoothly as I could ever have imagined in my wildest dreams back in the Geforce 3 days of 2004!

New Values:

zTexCacheOutTimeMSec=960000
zTexCacheSizeMaxBytes=128000000
zSndCacheOutTimeMSec=40000
zSndCacheSizeMaxBytes=80000000
; ... with these settings you can tune the memory usage of the texture and sound resources.
; if you have more ram than 512 MB, greater values will improve performance

[Korianous]

I quadruppled the figures set aside for memory allocation and now I have a Gothic 2 running as maxed out and as smoothly as I could ever have imagined in my wildest dreams back in the Geforce 3 days of 2004!

New Values:

zTexCacheOutTimeMSec=960000
zTexCacheSizeMaxBytes=128000000
zSndCacheOutTimeMSec=40000
zSndCacheSizeMaxBytes=80000000
; ... with these settings you can tune the memory usage of the texture and sound resources.
; if you have more ram than 512 MB, greater values will improve performance

Nice, that would have been my next suggestion :). Have fun §wink.