Overview
A collection of adjustments intended to make Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire run without giving you a brain aneurysm.
Obvious Basics
If you suffer poor performance in even the least taxing areas (ship interiors, small dungeons etc.) then it isn’t entirely the game’s fault. If you have your graphics settings ramped up high while playing on an average or lower-end rig then you can’t blame the engine for stuttering like a 12 year old on speed. The dynamic lighting & shadows, water effects and particles are rather advanced and take their toll on these systems. It should be obvious, but try setting everything to its lowest possible in-game setting. The game looks fine like this imo (but may be a turn off for some), and it certainly improves performance.
(It should be noted that there is some poor optimisation with the lighting, shadows and occlusion)
Less Obvious Basics (and why they help!)
Deadfire suffers from some awful load times & memory leakage (overflowing past the 2-3 hour mark of runtime), fortunately we can remedy the load times & partially fix the memory leaks (further helped by later fixes) by simply reinstalling the game to an SSD. If you’re like me you originally installed the game to a HDD to save yourself from 40gbs of precious SSD space, assuming that it being an isometric game would mean decent load times even on a basic storage drive. This isn’t the case, and you, like me, were probably disheartened by the 12-20 second load times for each area.
This is all assuming you have an SSD with at least 40+ gigabytes of free space (50 to avoid issues) but 250gb SSDs are relatively inexpensive & make a huge difference.
Right click on Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire in your steam library, click on the Local Files tab & check where it’s installed. If you installed Windows on your SSD then it should say that it takes up x amount of space on Storage D (or any other drive except Drive C). If you’re running windows off an HDD then it should say that it’s installed in Drive C.
Look for the Move Install Folder option at the bottom and move it to Drive C (if win is on SSD) or Drive D (if win is on HDD). This will take a while, ranging from 15 to 20 minutes, relocating fortunately doesn’t download any external files, so you can relocate while offline. Once this is done you should be getting decent load times, don’t stress about things related to the install folder, if you haven’t installed a game to your SDD before then steam will automatically create a folder with subfolders for all things steam-related just like it does when you install steam for the first time.
Alright, on to the easiest thing to explain:
Running as Admin
For some reason, Deadfire is a huge target for analysis software, so anti-viruses tend to spend a lot of time picking it apart. This can be stopped by simply going to your Deadfire install folder, right-clicking PillarsofEternityII.exe and clicking “properties”. In the Properties menu, go to the Compatibility section and check the box that says “Run as Admin”. You’ll be asked if you want to run the game each time you open it up (through the exe or the steam launcher, it makes no difference) and you’ll have to click yes or no but that’s something you must live with.
If, by the end of this guide, nothing has helped the slowdowns faced after 2+ hours of playtime, simply close the game and open it again. Sure, it’s undignified & a bit ghetto but it works.
Higher-end stutter & crash fix
If you encounter stuttering and crashes on a high-end GPU then try limiting your fps to 60 (or 30, on a lower-end card). There is no option to do this in-game (or through any config files) but you can use 3rd party software (endorsed by devs) to limit the fps to a rate of your choosing.
Obsidian’s RTSS guide is rather unspecific & can be confusing, Rivatuner was a piece of free software that was used for overclocking Nvidia cards, so when Obsidian mentions how installing RTSS & limiting the framerate will help issues with Nvidia GPUs it can be a bit intimidating if you’re using an AMD or (gods forbid) Intel HD card. RTSS works fine with AMD (and as far as I know, Intel) cards so you don’t necessarily need to download MSI Afterburner or any overclocking software as well. RTSS is completely usable on its own.
[link]Once you’ve downloaded it & installed it, look for RTSS in your searchbar and open it as admin. Don’t worry if it appears like nothing is happening, go to your taskbar and look for the “show hidden icons” arrow. Click on it and look for a blue monitor icon with a cheesy red 60. Right click it and click “show“. The following interface should pop up.
Click the “Add” option to the bottom left and navigate to your Pillars of Eternity 2 install folder, which is hopefully on an SSD by now, and select PillarsOfEternityII.exe.
With this selected you can limit your framerate to 30, 60 or whatever suits your needs. Simply imput a value in the self-explanatory “Framerate limit” section and hit enter. You’ll notice a bunch of on/off options below it. Simply toggle On-Screen Display Support off and leave everything else. (If you are using an on-screen display for some overclocking software then keep it on!)
Once you’ve done this I’d recommend setting RTSS to start with windows (top-left), it will run minimised in the background with absolutely minimal CPU usage.
Special K (all credit goes to Kaldaien for this section)
This whole section is going to be regarding Kaldaien’s Special K fix. If this helps you then hey, he’s the one you should be thanking, not me)
Links:
Official Forum Post
[link]
PoEII Version (automatic download, you have been warned):
[link]
The actual mechanics of SK are beyond me, but the game itself doesn’t properly prioritise per-core worker threads (according to the Forum Post, my humble knowledge of these systems is far too limited to look into it for myself).
The following instructions are all sourced from the forum post (first link)
Download the .zip from the second link and extract the .dll (and the .pdb for debug log) to your Deadfire installation folder that we’ve been playing around with for the past while. This allows you to access SK in-game (Ctrl + Shift + Backspace).
Expand the advanced section & enable CPU Core Spoofing. Enter half the amount of CPU cores it usually uses & restart. You can try lowering the cores even further, but I’d recommend trying half.
UPDATE
Special K renders RTSS obsolete in regards to framerate limiting, do not use both. On top of that, it appears to conflict with the steam overlay & currently doesn’t work reliably with the latest version of Pillars of Eternity II (cursor unreliable, unresponsive clicks etc). This may be an issue a select few are having so you’re welcome to try it out but I’d recommend caution for now.
Disabling Multisampling (Credit: DoctorGnario)
This edit is all thanks to DoctorGnario, and so all credit goes to him & his guide.
Deadfire lacks any useful config files in the install folder and you can’t completely disable multisampling through the in-game settings. Fortunately you can adjust them through the registry.
While not in-game, hold Win+R and type in regedit. This opens the registry editor, simply erase the current directory it displays (can be Computer if you haven’t used regedit recently) and paste in the following:
Don’t let all the information overwhelm you, press Ctrl+F and paste in the folllowing:
Double click the result and change the value from 1 to 0 (zero, nought not “o”).
This should remedy general stuttering & freezing.
Special Thanks
My deepest thanks go to Kaldaien & Doctor Gnario. Their own guides for their respective fixes are more in-depth than mine (although I’ve tried to keep everything understandable), and contain visual aids if you feel overwhelmed by all the simple text in this guide.
Feel free to add me as a friend on steam if this guide helped you, comment on any issues I’ve made or on things I could describe better, comment on things that assisted you, rate, favourite etc…
Best of luck, ratsimulator.