I want to preface this by saying this game is fantastic, and I love the implications if more game companies could strive for this level of interactivity.

Having said that, I originally bought this on my old low-end PC I bought in 2008 and as one would expect it was pretty sluggish. But I recently bought an alienware X51 and now that i have it installed on the new machine I expected performance would drastically improve, and it does run noticeably faster, but not nearly as much as I was expecting. I've even put AA to 0x, turned off Vsync, tried both directX and openGI (and restarted) like the FAQ suggested and even dropped the resolution down to 800 X 600 and I still have it get bogged down quite a bit when I'm facing in the direction of any of the ladies.

The new machine has the intel core i5-3330, 8gig RAM, and the NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 (1gig ram) so I thought I was exceeding the system requirements, but maybe my system is still too low-end to expect smooth performance?

Or maybe I'm missing something silly here?

Having turned on OpenGI on my computer makes the game run with much slower fps (around 30). (even if i have everything else on low)
But if you choose DirectX instead of OpenGI i believe you will run the game normally on 60 fps. (with everything else set to hight)

To see the framerate press CTRL+S.

Now you should see several frame counters at the top left corner of your screen:

FPS: The framerate (it is clipped to 60 fps)
FPSR: The maximum framerate your system can have (unclipped)
PPSR: The framerate due to the CPU
SPSR: Not important

If FPSR > 60 and PPSR < 50 then your bottleneck is the CPU.
If FPSR < 50 and PPSR > 60 then you bottleneck is the Graphics card.

On some graphics cards there can be a large difference in performance between OpenGl and DirectX mode.
NVidia cards seem to work best with DirectX, while ATI cards sometimes work better with OpenGl.
You have to try that out yourself to see what works best.

On older systems the CPU can be the bottleneck. We recommend a system with at least a 2 GHz Dual Core.

@Boblicticious
The system specs. you describe are certainly good enough to play XStoryPlayer (test with CTRL+S if your framerate is around 60 fps)
I expect that the sluggishness you experience, is due to the fact that the game has slower movements for the main character (and other characters).
This is because we wanted the player to have more precise control over the movements.
Most games are action games that require fast movements, but XStoryPlayer is a game that is meant to be played more slowly, and focuses more on details.

Thanks for the response. ctrl-x didn't work to bring up the frame rate info, but ctrl-s did. I imagine it was just a typo.

Anyway, on the last stage of the dark dreams where your boss is in the SM room, on the settings I mentioned above (800X600, no anti aliasing, no vsync) I'm getting about 55 FPS when I face away from the boss, but when I turn around and face her the FPS drops to about 20-25. I've tested this both on openGI and directx (with game restarts between each check) and it doesn't really seem to affect anything.

My CPU frame rate seems solid though, ~115-120 when facing away from boss lady, and ~100-105 when facing her. So I suppose my real limiting factor here must be my GPU?

I wonder if having a lower resolution texture pack would help things. Maybe a potential new option in the settings in a later release? I'm going to continue to support this game and purchase any expansions that come out regardless, but just a thought if that's something that's easy or at least reasonable for you guys to look in to.

Thanks!

Sorry for the typo (CTRL+S).

I looked up the NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 specs and it is somewhat slower than I thought.
The memory of 1GB is enough (512 MB is minimum needed), so lower res. textures will not help.

The models of the characters however are very high poly to make them look smooth, and this is what hurts the performance. When looking away from the character it is culled, so thats why it is faster in that case.

Ok, that makes sense. Thanks for the info!

Here is what I got from all testings on different version of video cards. (Yes, I keep 20 of them around my house all the time)

Frame rates
Geforce 9500 GT: 18
Geforce GT 520: 17
HD Radeon 6570 2GB: 23
Geforce GTX 460: the full 60

The game runs slow and crappy on even 23, but really smooth on 60. the conclusion is, use a GTX for this game. keep in mind that GTX 400 series is really old, and you should be able to get one really cheap. All the cards I tested above cost way less than 100$, just in case.

I am really pleased to see tha finally, someone got the point, where adult games need to have very high resolution to look good. the only complaint I have is that the drawing of female head need some improvement (a little bit more cheerish instead of looking depressed), then we would have a first-class game.

Great test, thanks!

On a side note: The game also runs 60fps on for example a 8800 GT.
With Nvidia cards the second digit is what counts performance wise.
The first digit says more about the version of OpenGl/DirectX that is supported.

So a 8800 GT is much faster that a 9500 GT.

Well I had a fantastic eureka moment which was also a facepalm moment on my part yesterday.

I discovered that when you right click on executables, one of the menu options is to select which graphics card to play the game with... Apparently it defaults to the integrated graphics card.

So when I changed to run with the NVidia performance card... it was like night and day. Apparently I'm not as computer savvy as I thought or I would have discovered this sooner. In any case, I can now run this in 1920 X 1080, vsync on, and I'm getting a rock solid 60FPS throughout the entire game.

I feel like a doofus.

Good to hear it worked out!