As the title says, there is a stuttering problem with this game.

To replicate the issue yourself, and witness it visually, you have to have msi afterburner installed, and the frametime graph enabled.

First launch the game while being offline.
The game is capped at 120 fps and while in the menu you can see the frametime is a flat line,
but every 5 seconds it stutters as it drops to 30 frames per second. If you continue and play, the stutter persists.

Now, quit the game, go online and launch the game again. The frametime is completely flat with no spikes at all.

All the testing can be done in the game menu, no need to actually play the game to verify the problem.

There must be an online check going on behind the scenes that causes this issue, because I have tried it on many computers and Windows versions and the problem is always there.

Unfortunately I have limited networking knowledge in order to track the server it pings by monitoring my network traffic and fix the problem myself, so I'm posting here to point out the issue and maybe someone more knowledgeable than me can find a fix, or even the GOG team releases an official hotfix or something.

I always play my single player games offline and GOG games are perfect for that, except for this one.

Any ideas?

Seems weird. Did you try to contact gog support? (Chat bot is kind of annoying but you can bypass it and then send this to support)

@alexandros050

No, I didn't, because I wanted to run it by the community first, mainly for two reasons.

A. I need more people to verify the problem, just in case there's some glitch in my testing.

B. Maybe there's an easy fix, I don't know, like editing the hosts file and someone here knows the solution.


We have to verify that this bug exists for everyone first, then I'll escalate the problem to the GOG team.

By the way, do you have the game? Did you try to replicate the problem?

No I don't own the game. Was interested since there is a good deal right now until I read your post. So now I will wait for someone to test this first.

Mini update.

I tried launching it through GOG galaxy, same problem as with the standalone installer.

If I'm online it doesn't stutter. If I go offline it stutters.

I also tried a cracked steam version, same problem. Even pirates omitted to remove the online check :(

So far, no matter the version, no matter the launcher, the game is stutter-free only if you are connected to the Internet.

i've had this problem with the game ever since the original retail version and its still there it seems

Yeah, it's a shame, and I don't think that it will ever get fixed.

Come to think of it, if GOG ever becomes aware of the problem, they will probably take down the game, like they did with Hitman, rather than fix the problem.

So, I'm really on the fence about reporting the problem to them. I probably won't.

This started recently as I've played this game to completion at least 5x already. I played a bit on steam and got microstutters and in forums it shows so do others.

I get the same results being online or offline. Steady 120fps with occasional 121/119 or down to 100 sometimes.

Same interval being online or offline.

Offline is my disabling my network adapter in the Network Connections.

Task manager always says 0 data usage either way,

I launched it from the game's folder.

About 2004/5 with Doom 3 there was noticed something similar happening. I was at QuakeCon and people had the same issue with Doom 3 and couldn't figure out out. Once you saw it the issue was obvious.

We spent several days trying things out, then we figured out it wasn't Doom 3, but DX 9 & new API's. Any older API (OGL 1.1 or older, DX 8 or older) never has the stutter, DX 9/OGL 1.2 & newer had the stutter. It was an API issue and happened in EVERY game. The issue was the game was skipping a frame to keep the game tics running smoothly so the game didn't slow down (like how Wolf3D was allowed to run at the fastest game framerate possible, so on slow computers you had more reaction time, faster computers = less reaction time).

Happened in HL2, D3, any engine as along as it was DX 9 or newer. Bioshock even had the frame stutter (Unreal Engine games even had the texture pop people complained about in Rage, nobody noticed).

Turns out the only solution was built in to Doom 3 but wasn't on by default & it apparently was the only engine that could fix this (I'm guessing others could but not from the console). Doom 3 let you manually lock ALL frames to game tic's, however, then the game could slow down. So you would get graphically as many FPS as you wanted, game would only update at 30fps and it would run EVERY game frame. so when things got intense instead of skipping a frame to keep gameplay smooth, everything went in slow motion.

This is all less noticeable now because most games can run so fast the drop doesn't effect monitor refresh rates most of the time.

I'm guessing this is the exact same thing as Singularity is UE 3, Bioshock is UE 2.5, and it happened in other UE3 games too.

same problem here but I go from 121 to 117fps every 5 s, whether I'm offline or not, any solution?