hello all,

Posting here because the DM forums appear pretty dead.

I'm having a problem with the steam version of Dark Messiah. No matter what settings I run (all maxed out or all min) I am getting about 2-8 FPS.

When I first began the game and played the tutorial level, the scene riding the horse and the following scene running around the city to kill the cyclops I had no problems..about 60-100 FPS.

As soon as i entered the dudes castle my FPS just dived.. when I load into a game it runs at about 30-60 fps and after about 30 seconds to a minute just drops to ~9 fps then declines all the way to 1 or 2.

Here are my PC specs:

AMD 64 X2 5200 +
DX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT 512MB / Driver 6.14.0011.7519 (16/05/2008)
3GB of ram

I am currently playing (non-steam) games, with good FPS

Call Of Duty 4 - all settings maxed 1680x1050 res
Crysis - most settings maxed some medium 1680x1050
Turok - all maxed
Overlord - all maxed
Conflict Ops - all maxed
Bioshock - all maxed

Steps I have taken to fix:

Completely removed steam files / registry entries and re-installed with no improvement.

I figure this post is pretty vague but any help would be greatly appreciated.

quote:

Originally posted by dbomers:
hello all,

Posting here because the DM forums appear pretty dead.

That's because i am not a mod here, i run my own Dark Messiah forum (see my signature) where it's my pleasure to help everybody out beyond the Instructions and Troubleshooting thread (which basically covers everything), however i don't keep the version on ubiforum updated anymore.

If you're on XP, install the AMD dual core optimizer.

Thank you very much for the reply.

I read through your entire help file and I was able to try a few things:

I changed the size of my virtual memory
I realized I was running on an un-supported resolution of 1680x1050 and changed that.

I regularly keep my drives defragmented with defraggler.

I've seen a slight improvement.. Im now running on all settings on min or disabled and im getting about 60 FPS..

But there is still times when my FPS drop to 10 or below.

My question is..do you think this is acceptable on a rig with my specs? I personally feel it's a little ridiculous.

No i dont think this is acceptable on a rig like yours, i was amazed when i found out my dell inspiron 6400 was able to run this with default specs with or without charger and no problems, usually i had to tune down my resolution when using source games

anyway your rigs specs wipe my laptops ones off the floor so hopefully you'll be able to get that fixed, also looking over your specs i was hoping to try out DM on a friends comp that had awsome specs similar to yours so hopefully i wont get the same problem you do

well if DM decides it wants to work on my comp, stuck up little DM barely works, and by that i mean, rarely ever theres no error messages

FWIW I have the same problem and have never managed to fix it.

The game runs fine until the framerate drops to 5fps or so after 10 minutes. Quitting and restarting lets me play another 5 or 10 minutes.

It gets old really fast. :-(

That's with a nVidia 7950GX2 (with SLI enabled). I've tried drivers from everybody including Guru3D (or 3DGuru, whatever it's called, I don't run Windows much).

In the end I gave up on Dark Messiah. It's the only game I have that just won't run (everything else I run at 1920x1200 with most settings on high without trouble). I've wasted hours on it, time to move on.
Kind of sad but from what I've seen here there, nobody knows what causes this and there's no clear way to fix it.

I'll have to read a walkthrough so I at least know what the story was about...