Dead Simple 2020 fix everything

Overview

Are you tired of reading, tweaking and restarting? Just want to play ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game properly? This is what worked for me and fixed everything. NO CHOICES, UNDERSTANDING OR THINKING REQUIRED.

Intro

I wanted to play the game for the first time. I absolutely did not want to fix it, restart to see if some random solution worked, play for 20 minutes and spot another issue!

Do you feel how mad i was? Do you feel the same?

I have read all guides, PC Gaming Wiki and tried different stuff so you won’t need to. I have beaten the game from start to end on hard difficulty with this setup, if this is important for you.

First save point

You inevitably will restart game to see if things worked or not, and you don’t want to see the first cutscene (which lasts and loads like forever) 10 times like i did. It breaks the mood and you start to feel sarcastic and not serious about whole thing, which is a bummer.

Just save the game in the room after the first door! Since you are not used to game mechanics, the save station can be difficult to spot. See the screenshot. It is not a spoiler in any way, it’s first 30 seconds of the game.

Difficulty workaround

Game resets difficulty to Normal and poisons your save game file with wrong difficulty. And you can’t change it in settings mid-game. There is no fix for this behavior, but:

Never use “Continue game”
Always use “Load game”
You may want to protect yourself from screwing up by saving game in different slots every hour or so
Check difficulty displayed on a save slot
It is also possible to edit save game file with HEX editor, but i won’t describe this because this is a no-thinking guide 🙂

Bunch of fixes for graphics

Issues fixed by these manipulations

Note that some of the issues are not apparent until you played the game for some time, so follow the guide carefully.

Broken physics
Broken walking and running speed
Wrong cutscenes animation speed causing desync with audio and events
“Door bug” which blocks you from proceeding after 5 minutes of the game
Lagginess caused by bad in-game VSync implementation
Brightness is too high even on lowest setting

In-game settings

Set up like on this screenshot. We will polish things a bit later.

Use your native resolution and refresh rate
Disable Full Screen
Disable Vsync
I recommend disabling Motion Blur in advanced settings

NVidia Profile Inspector

We need to tune hidden graphics settings for the game. NVidia solution only. Sorry Intel and Radeon users, you are outnumbered, and this guide can’t help everyone without becoming a large mess!

Download NVidia Profile Inspector[github.com] and launch it. Find Dead Space profile.
You can download my profile[drive.google.com] and import it, or set things manually.

Settings applied:

Section 2 – Sync and Refresh:
Set Frame Rate Limiter V3: 60 FPS
Set Vertical Sync: Force on
Section 3 – Antialiasing:
Set Antialiasing – Mode: Override any application setting
Set Antialiasing – Setting: 8xQ [8x Multisampling] or less if you need better performance
Set Antialiasing – Transparency Supersampling: 8x Sparse Grid Supersampling or less if you need better performance
Section 4 – Texture Filtering:
Set Anisotropic filtering mode: User-defined / Off
Set Anisotropic filtering setting: 16x or less if you need better performance

Borderless Gaming

Game is required to run in window mode, but it has borders! Download Borderless Gaming[github.com] to fix this. How to use:

Launch Borderless Gaming, it may be hidden under [BG] icon in tray
Launch Dead Space
Borderless Gaming will show Dead Space on the left. Select it and press [>] button to move it to the right
It should remove borders from the game window
You will always need this app to run with the game. Enable in Options:
Run On Startup
Start Minimized To Tray
Close To Tray

See if FPS is actually limited

You will need to check if you applied settings properly. If you use any FPS counter already, skip this.

I use RTSS (RivaTuner Statistics Server) because NVidia Experience is unreliable and tends to break with meaningless errors, Fraps is propietary, and Steam overlay is bound to Steam.
Get RTSS here[www.guru3d.com] and set up like on the screenshot.

Input fix