Final release is about half the speed of the beta?

I've played a few games with the final release (or at least the pre-day-0 version that's available now). The first thing I noticed is that the game is really slow compared to the last beta. It doesn't seem like a video problem: the video is totally smooth when I move the camera around, and all the action is visually smooth (not choppy) -- it's just that the characters on screen are moving about half the speed they did in the beta. In a possibly related note, the scoreboard shows my sim speed as being "-2". Once in a while the game speeds up to what I would consider "normal speed" or even faster for a few seconds, then goes back to being slow again.

I turned all the video and sound settings down to the lowest levels, just to be safe, and didn't see an improvement. In case it matters, the video card on this laptop is a GeForce 8600M, according to the label on the front, and the CPU is a 2.2 GHz Core Duo, and it has 2GB of RAM. It's running the installation of Vista that came preinstalled.

demigod

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Hmm. Your system looks good.

I assume this happens even single player? If you're playing other people, the game will be as slow as it is for the slowest player. But obviously a sim speed of -2 is poblematic.

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No such issues for myself. Feels like it did in beta.

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That's odd. For me gameplay is the same or slightly better than last beta.

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OsirisDawn

Join Date 09/2004

+30

I have the same problem like the OP. In BETA i had Sim Speed like 2 or 3, in release i get -5 to 1. Its strange.

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The slowness I reported is in single-player -- I haven't tried multiplayer with the new release yet.

Here's another oddity: I rebooted my system based on a note in another thread. When I did that, the sim speed increased to 1. But where before I had a slow game but smooth interaction with it, now it was choppy -- low framerate, periodic pauses, etc. I also noticed that the disk was running continuously, even when I paused the game. According to Process Explorer, Demigod is reading around 200-300 kilobytes of data from my disk per second while it's paused and minimized. (!) Its virtual size is only 1GB, so I doubt it's swapping (considering that I have 2GB of RAM). Not sure what else could be going on.

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So, just after I wrote the reply above, I re-maximized the game and started playing again -- and it was basically smooth and at the right speed. I played for about five to ten minutes, and the choppiness came back. When I switched back to Process Explorer (couldn't do that earlier because I had to download & install it first), I saw that a process called "LuCallbackProxy" was taking 20-40% of my CPU time. According to Google, this is something to do with my anti-virus software. Haven't investigated it further.

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