Hello all,

Just bought Jedi Knight DF2 here off GOG since the Steam version is terrible, and when I play the game it seems like the framerate is low. It gives me a headache which is unfortunate since I'm looking to relive my childhood here! Does anyone know how to fix this?

Also, when I enable hardware acceleration and go to 1920x1080, the screen appears black though the crosshair and UI all appear. When I disable the hardware acceleration,it works fine but doesn't take up the whole screen due to no 1080p. I realize there is a thread about similar issues but I'm hoping to get this GOG copy working since I just spent money on it.

Thanks

Jedi Knight seems to have a strange rendering setup, with different parts of the game (camera, first-person viewmodel animations, character movement) appearing to update at different rates.

Check my posts in this thread for a bit more detail and a method that might make the game feel a bit smoother (use an external program like Rivatuner to cap the framerate at 47fps (or a multiple of 47fps)).

Capping the FPS is a *very* useful tip. Feels much much smoother now.

Two observations however:
1) Capping in MSI Afterburner/Rivatuner doesn't seem to work. It caps the FPS but doesn't make the camera smoother as Dxtory or NVidia Inspector caps do.
2) I'm not entirely sure, and it may be my imagination, but a cap of 46 seems slightly smoother than 47.

Hmm, the Rivatuner framerate limit worked when I used it, just had to make sure the "application detection level" was set to at least Medium. I noticed my settings image link in that other thread was broken, I've updated it.

EDIT: strange, now that I've tried it again I'm seeing the same effect you posted - maybe a driver update or something changed the way it behaves.

Tried using Nvidia Inspector instead, and that works (after creating a 46fps limit option in the CustomSettingNames_en-EN.xml).
I found out why setting a 46fps cap produces a better result than 47 using this method - for some reason the actual cap appears to end up being 1fps higher than what you set, so setting it to 47 makes the game run at 48fps. At 48fps, the camera movement stutters (pauses) roughly every 6 frames.
Setting the cap to 46fps seems to make the game run at 47, which doesn't have stuttering in the camera movement.

Yeah, odd that it doesn't work anymore. May try updating it? I didn't know how to set a custom cap in Inspector.

And that was my suspicion regarding 46 vs 47.

This looks like the most promising solution, but I haven't been able to get it to work. I used the Frame Rate Limiter setting in Nvidia Inspector to set it to 46 but it only seemed to run worse than leaving it at 60. I also tried limiting the framerate via PrecisionX (what I use normally) and have been able to get the game to run noticeably smoother (still not perfect) but only ONCE and I cannot duplicate it. Oh well, I suppose it's playable with the camera in 30fps until a better solution is found..

But does anyone know if the game always ran like this or is it a modern hardware issue?

Already using the latest version of RivaTuner Statistics Server I used the instructions here to create the custom 46fps cap in Nvidia Inspector.

<CustomSettingValue>
<UserfriendlyName>46 fps</UserfriendlyName>
<HexValue>0xF000002E</HexValue>
</CustomSettingValue> If you monitor your framerate while playing the game with the limit set to 46 (using something like FRAPS), what does the framerate monitor say?

Maybe try setting a slightly higher or lower limit (1 - 2 fps either way) - might get very different results with different values. No idea :P
I played not long after it was originally released, but didn't really know much about framerates or weird graphics engines at the time...

The first-person weapon animations play too fast at 60+fps. Lightsaber swings appear to be in sync with the third-person animations at 47fps.

With the FPS limit imposed, the FPS counter fluctuated between 47 and 48.

Ok, I just got a limit of 45 to run smoothly but it stops after a while and becomes choppy again. It seems like capping the framerate is more like a suggestion to the graphic's engine and not a hard limit, and once it deviates too far the camera refresh rate becomes halved again and stays halved. That's my theory at least, because I just can't get consistent results even after trying a range of values from 44 to 48.

Having the camera running at 40 fps consistently seems like the next best thing so I might leave my framerate completely uncapped, my FPS seems to hover around 120 if I do that. It is really strange that the framerate would work this way, how the heck did you figure this out in the first place??

Hmm, it's a shame these framerate limiters are so inconsistent. I guess some internal timer might be out of sync with the game, or imprecise, or... something like that... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Some possible alternatives for framerate limiting:

• You could try creating a custom resolution through Nvidia Control Panel, e.g. 1440x1080, 16-bit colour, set to run at 47Hz or 40Hz, and enable V-sync on that. Might be tricky to get the game running at the right refresh rate if the resolution already exists, so if that occurs you could try making a unique resolution like 1440x1079 (with only the 47Hz refresh rate available)

• Run FRAPS while playing, set video capture to 47 or 40fps, half-size, no audio, lock framerate while recording, then press and hold the record hotkey until the framerate counter turns pink (should lock to the specified FPS). Requires a bit of free hard-drive space (determined by loop buffer length), may be a bit jittery on slower HDDs. Might not be advisable to use on an SSD due to repeated writes. Other recording software might have similar options, could perform better. Originally I was just trying to find a framerate where the weapon animations looked normal. I have a 120Hz monitor, so the camera running at ~40fps normally didn't seem too choppy to me (compared to how I expected the 30fps cap I'd seen mentioned to look).
The first thing I tried was enabling half refresh rate adaptive V-sync through Nvidia Control Panel, which made the weapon animations look a bit closer to normal but made the camera movement feel pretty bad. The animations were still a bit fast (comparing the timing of the right-click lightsaber swings vs. when they actually hit), so I decided to try 1/3rd refresh rate V-sync. That improved the animations even more, and bizarrely made the camera movement much smoother than half refresh V-sync. Once I noticed this I decided to look at other caps to find the highest framerate I could use with both smooth camera motion and normal animation speeds - I switched to using RTSS for framerate limiting and tried a cap of 50fps (awful), 49 (slightly better), 48, 47...

tl;dr: fiddling around and trial and error

Hi,

I made some tests on my own, and that's what I found out.
It seems to me that the framerate cap at best delay the problem. Doesn't fix a thing.
With the 47 fps limit suggested, it worked for a couple of minutes to finally fall back to sloppy camera movements.
I tried 46, 45, 40, same results, sloppy movements coming sooner or later. The cap doesn't seem to be linked to the time need for the problem to rise. I also had smooth camera at 144FPS a couple of times.
I also noticed that the camera "speed" seems to lower the lower I set the framerate cap. For example, I tried to limit at 30fps, and the camera seemed to act like the game was at 10FPS.

DreadMoth -> Did you play through the whole game with the framerate cap without having this problem ? Maybe you remember which were the drivers ?

Now that I've tested a bit more I seem to be getting this as well :-/
I wonder if something else is affecting how the game runs, like background programs or CPU / GPU clocks changing with usage / load...

I think I played through most of the game without it, then used it for the last couple of levels (without any problems as far as I remember).

My post in that other thread was on 26th May 2015, so I was probably using driver version 352.86 (released 18th May 2015).

Funny. I'm using latest Nvidia drivers and don't think I'm experiencing it getting worse again (it's hard to tell if that's me getting used to the 46 and thinking it's not enough, or if it's gone back to 30).

I did however play the game at 60 (after forgetting to start DXtory) for a few minutes the other day, and it was smooth as butter!

So you're not experiencing any slow camera movements with the latest drivers ?
What's are your windows version and graphic card ? Any DDraw wrapper ?

For the record, I tried the game on linux through wine and it seems to be affected by the same issue.

First person animations seem to behave a bit differently in Mysteries of the Sith - might need a cap at 30fps to look normal :-/ (at least for the lightsaber, other weapons look "okay" at 40 - 60).
Camera smoothness seems to behave similarly to the main game (and appears to suffer the same inconsistency with framerate caps - sometimes it looks great, other times, really juddery)

-----

More weirdness (in both games):

1. have framerate monitored (without capping)
2. flip through list of force powers and/or items quickly (or do something else to make a few lines of text appear)
3. watch framerate drop

I don't think there is any way to get out of this. It seems as inevitable as the camera problem in Rogue Squadron...
So much issues with my beloved childhood games... :( I tried many wrapper, framerate control...
I guess I'm still lucky to have 144hz, it kind of reduces the damage, at the cost of 1st person animations...