The game just runs so s-l-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-w-ly.

At best the FPS is about 12, which drops to barely 2 if more than half a dozen NPCs happen to be on screen at the time, or you have more than one window (or "plate" as DD seems to label them) open!
Load and Save times are excrutiatingly long also.
The mouse pointer is also jerky and laggy.

It's barely even playable.

What's the deal? This is no 10 trillion polygon 1920 resolution 3DFX extravaganza! It's a bunch of (rather ugly IMO) bitmap backgrounds and a few small hard to make-out sprites!!!!! Graphically behind the times even for 2002 IMO. It's more like a 1992 game! DD can't even piss on Diablo 1's GFX despite D1 being release a full five years earlier - a five year period which saw massive advancements in PC GFX to boot!

And my computer is not an ancient 1990's Pentium neither. It's a 2015 machine!

Still despite the thoroughly ugly GFX, there seems to be a decent RPG with a good story hiding in there and I wan't to be able to play it at least at 30 FPS.
The only thing I can think is causing the trouble is the curse of all gamers, Microshit's Windows 8.1! Trying the game in "XP compatability" mode made no difference.

Oh yes, and the SFX are somewhat busted too..... often giving out an earsplitting bout of white noise at seemingly random intervals.

Any help guys?

I'd recommend trying DDrawCompat.

Failing that you can set the game to run in software mode instead of Direct3D using configtool.exe in the game directory, which should be fast, though you may lose a few visual effects.

Check out Stuff's very useful post.

http://www.gog.com/forum/divinity_series/divine_divinity_running_very_slow_and_clunky/post4

Nope. I'm afraid the game is for the toilet.

Now I find ALL my savegames have corrupted. The LOT. ALL of 'em.

No matter which one I load I just get Windows error message: "Divine Divinity has stopped working, Windows is looking for a solution". A solution which never arrives.

This is regardless of any game settings. The lot has gone.

I've reinstalled it and everything to no avail. All saves remain busted.

Funny enough, about a hour ago the PC itself had a funny turn. When I switched it on, it made a very loud beeping noise, booted up *without* me having to press the power-on button on the case - which has NEVER happened before - booted straight into Desktop without even asking me to log on - which has also NEVER happened before - then Windows went crazy, locked up, and came up with a message ":( Sorry your PC has encountered problems and needs to restart" in huge letters. It's only since then the saves have gone.

I doubt your saves would really get corrupted if all you did was trying to load them and didn't actually overwrite them with new saves. Nevertheless it may be a good idea to make a backup of them, even now, just in case.

That error message is a pretty generic message when a process crashes. Most likely you changed some setting and now the game crashes whenever you try to enter the game world - even using a proper save. It would probably do the same if you tried to start a new game.

If you installed DDrawCompat from my link above then you should try uninstalling it - simply delete the ddraw.dll file from the game's install directory. Also please share the contents of the ddraw.log file it generated.
If you did any other changes, try reverting those also.
There is a Reset button in configtool.exe that should reset the graphics config to default, worth a try too.

If all else fails, you should try reinstalling the game to a different directory this time. That at least should make sure you have a clean install. If the new install works correctly, try copying your save games there too and see if they work fine now.

Hi guys,

I'm a bit late reading the above replies. I'd left the game for a few days and got into playing Sword of the Stars instead.
I've deleted everything, corrupt saves and all so I can't show you guys any of the files..... sorry!

My only option is to start all over again running in software mode which seems smooth - and it's getting installed on a Flash drive, I'm not ready to trust this game with saving to a hard-drive - doubly so for the C: drive.

Right, let's see what happens this time.....

Save and loads are still slow - that's probably down to running the game from a flash drive however.
It sometimes freezes totally when transitioning from one area to another, such as going up/down the ladder in Joram's shack.
The voice SFX have all suddenly switched off, without me changing any settings whatsoever. One minute they worked, next they didn't. Any ideas?

Worst of all..... after quiting the game, and attempting to re-load..... it will not. No error messages, no nothing. Just simply nothing happens.

Edit: Yet *another* complete uninstall / reinstall..... and having to risk installing it to the damn C: drive again (this game had better not corrupt the damn disk with it's saves again) has fixed it refusing to even run. But the NPC dialog voices are still gone!!!!! I'm sure every single dialog had a voice track for it..... was I dreaming this? The only voice is now when your character reads that sign that says "Dangerous dwarf to the north"..... everything else is stoney silence!

Nothing happens at all. It's a total freeze. Only Task Manager or a reboot gets you out of it. Thankfully it's only an occasional thing. As long as I save beforehand it's not causing too much bother! And I guess I was dreaming about all the voice overs then!

PS/ How do you charm items? I can't work it out at all!

PPS/ "The Halberd of the Rock - There's Something Strange About This Weapon"..... I'll say there is, Jesus!!!!! This nearly had me restarting the game a THIRD time..... which actually I wouldn't have done..... I'd have just chucked the whole lot down the shitter 100% instead :D - even just having it in your inventory, never mind *actually equipped* made your stamina drain to zero - which meant you were pretty much permanently shagged combat wise! The damn thing wasn't even "identified" (needing a level 3 ID skill) so you had no warning. Actually even whe IDed the stats still said *nothing* about the stamina screw-over..... Whose idea was this "Halberd of the Rock" anyway?

Pretty sure I was doing that from the start - whatever it is working as inteded now! Thanks Raze.

Now I've got the game working at speed, and saving seems stable, this game really is up there with the classics. It's both classics like Diablo 1 and Baldur's Gate combined.

I have found another bug though - it's not likely this'll ever get addressed with a patch, seeing as DD is now 14 years old it's unlikely any further development work is being done with it. The big graveyard south of Rivertown, when that zombie Jake kidnaps Elona, save games are disabled! I mean, WTH? Whose idea was *that*!!!!! However even worse, if you also then meet the two graverobbers Antoinette and Victor just to the west, tell them that you've already dumped on Thelyron, so they may as well bog-off..... the game gets stuck. The UI disables whilst they are meant to "bog-off"..... except they don't! They just stand there, forever..... and the UI won't re-enable till they've bogged-off. Ie, you're in an eternal loop.

You can avoid this by going to the sorting out Antoinette and Victor first, BEFORE running into Jake. Avoid entering the graveyard at it's north entrance..... that triggers the whole Jake malarky. Go around to the west of the graveyard first and deal with A & V.

Just thought I'd save other players still to do this bit the agro of spending ages killing the hordes of Jake's corpse minions, only to then get A & V crash the game out!

Hey, maybe I missed it, but the did the link the dev posted for that lag patch work? I was dealing with major slow down, too. Also, I did a bit of a marathon session on my day off today and near the end of it (about 7 hours) every time I transitioned to a new area it was blacked out. I had to save and reload to make the environment visible again. I'm running this on Windows 10, fyi. Loving this game and I'd very much like to play all they way through it :)

What ? Are you serious ?

Divine Divinity unique arts and graphics style is absolutely gorgeous... still in 2017!

2D bonanza!