Every time I play Gothic 3, the game suddenly shifts into slow motion after a few minutes. I never know when this will happen, nor is there any apparent reason for it, but it always happens eventually. The speed of the game (not the frame rates, which are just fine) suddenly drops to about 1/3 normal, and the only way to get it back the way it should be is to quit to the desktop and restart, which is really annoying. Simply reloading a save doesn't fix it.

XP SP3
Radeon HD 5770

Plenty of RAM and GHz.

Anyone have a solution? Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks.

I had a similar issue myself the last time I started Gothic 3, with the exception that the slow motion happened immediately instead of kicking in after a few minutes. I ended up just restarting my whole system and the problem went away after that. Never did figure out what the cause was, and I have no idea if this "fix" will work for you, but it's worth a shot if you haven't tried it yet.

This is certainly strange. The first time I started up Gothic 3 today I had a similar issue. I skipped through the intro movies and it took forever to reach the menu. It took even longer to load my saved game. I honestly thought the game had locked up.

When the game finally did load I had a feeling something wasn't right so I restarted the game. The second time I loaded it up everything was normally.

EDIT: I'm running version 1.75 of the community patch.

The 1.75 patch usually fixes the problem.

My first suggestion would be also to try the newest patch (because the game here on gog doesnt seem to have it, but not sure, because I have the retail version).

I myself had never such or similar speed problems (just some of the usual stuttering), but as far as I remember, there was a problem with multicore systems in the past. For AMD CPUs there existed a driver for Windows XP to fix such problems in some games or in some other software, that had problems with multicore CPUs. I never installed it in a windows after XP, maybe the problem doesnt exist in newer windows versions.

If the patch doesnt help and you have a multicore system, a solution could be to run the game fixed on one core. For example by using the start command from batch with the right parameters (but I am not sure if the start command of the really outdated Windows XP even supports this already).

I figured it out. The new community patch introduces some new graphics options in the ge3.ini file. What you need to do is change:

Timer.ThreadSafe=true

to

Timer.ThreadSafe=false

That solved the problem for me. Thanks German-language Gothic fan forum for that!

Hopefully this will help some of you who have also had trouble with this bizarre bug.

EDIT: So far, so good.

I can't mark my own post as the solution, so if anyone tried the fix I posted and it works, re-post it and I'll mark that post as the solution so people can look it up in the future.

Good enough!

I haven't had this problem one time since I changed the setting, so I'm marking it solved.

I have been having the same issue and was going to try your solution, however this "Timer.Threadsafe=true" does not exist in my ge3.ini?

I think you need the latest patch. GoGs version doesnt have this latest patch.

Yes, I believe that's the most recent version. IIRC