Daggerfall Workshop Forums

hi, after playing i noticed that when i enter a tavern or a building with lots of light sources my fps go down a lot even after disabling shadows

Hey welcome to the forums.

Please provide your system specs (e.g. CPU, RAM, GPU) and attach a zipped copy of the player log to a reply here. Link below shows how to find logs.

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2360&p=27552#p27552

We'll be able to see if anything is failing causing the lag, or at least offer suggestions for optimisations.

here is my player log my pc specs are:
Intel(R) Celeron(R) J4005 CPU @ 2.00GHz 2.00 GHz
8,00 GB (7,65 GB utilizzabile)
Intel(R) UHD Graphics 600

Mmmh the equivalent of a Geforce GTX 660 is often cited as minimum recommended for Daggerfall Unity, and the UHD Graphics 600 is way below that:
https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/N ... 2vsm407837

i think i will deal with it , i can still play the game fine in dungeons and in the overworld so is just a minor issue for me

There has been some discussions before about running DFU on low-end GPUs, say
viewtopic.php?t=1737
But it seems you already applied most recommendations (lower resolution, disable shadows,...)
You could try other things, like enabling retro mode (which will further lower "world" resolution, but not game UI)

This is excellent advice to make the game run smoother, but also it IS kinda weird how strangely resource-intensive some taverns get. My computer isn't exactly high-end but it generally runs the game at around 60-70 fps, and around 100 with retro rendering enabled, but some of the bigger taverns can easily grind my FPS to half of what it'd normally run at.

I've noticed GPUs with poor fillrates tend to lag in interiors due to the large number of closely overlapping lights. Removing these lights (e.g. make interiors ambient-only like classic) helps a lot for interiors. When lights are spread out and don't overlap much (city exteriors and most parts of dungeons) it's not as bad. The more lights and the higher resolution of the gbuffer, the worse the problem is. Discrete GPUs, even older ones, seem to perform much better at MRT and deferred rendering than integrated GPUs.

An option to switch off DFU's interior lighting and just use ambient like classic would be a good assist here for lower-end / integrated grahics. I should add that at some point.

Yes IK, for example the 3 torches at the main room in Privateers hold, they tanked my performance a lot as well. Exactly as you said, overlapping multiple light sources. Or the place in same dungeon, where one of the imp is, in the middle of 5 skull candles.

But since you implemented that optimalization of distance few months back, my PC can run it 60fps. But thats a R5 3600 & GTX970. So ppl with very low HW will still suffer. Allowing only ambient light will be great for potatoes

Thankfully default dungeons have fairly optimal lights out of game data. The imp circle for example is just 1 light hand-placed in the middle of seven candles.


If a mod overrides this with individual light sources for each candle, it's going to perform a lot worse. At least without mods or shadows, dungeons run generally OK even on potatoes these days.

But yeah, interiors have no such help. I'll add an option when I can to disable individual light sources in interiors and just use ambient like classic.