Grim Fandango on NVIDIA Optimus - choppy cutscenes

[WuXeS]

Hello,

First of all - THANK YOU for the software. I'm now playing GF on my Win 8.1 laptop.

There's one issue - not a huge deal, but maybe someone could help. My laptop is an NVIDIA Optimus machine, which means I've got both an integrated Intel HD4600 and a separate GeForce GTX 765M. I can switch between them depending on which GPU I want for which application.

Obviously both GPUs can run GF silky smooth with no problems, but only the GTX allows me to force antialiasing, which helps a bit with the dated looks of GF. Problem is, the cutscenes are choppy - as if dropping frames. The 3D game itself runs flawlessly, it's just the cutscenes that act as if there's a performance bottleneck (obviously there isn't any). That's on the latest non-beta NVIDIA drivers.

On the other hand, the integrated HD4600 has no trouble with the cutscenes (they're perfectly smooth), but doesn't allow forced antialiasing - and since there's no in-game AA, well, jaggiefest it is.

Has anyone else encountered this issue and maybe knows a fix? Again, it's not a huge deal, but you know.

[klusark]

I have a laptop running Windows 7 with a Nvidia 310M and some Intel integrated card. I'm not seeing the problem you described here.

Are you using the nightly build, or the 0.1.1 release? Does it happen in both versions for you?

I don't really see how a different graphics card would really matter here as the cut scenes are decoded in software and then the screen size frames are rendered to screen. There doesn't seem to be a lot of room to be dropping frames...

[WuXeS]

I'm using 0.1.1. I've just tried the latest nightly build and there's no difference.

When I launch GF with the NVIDIA GPU, the LucasArts logo and the subsequent cigarette scene are smooth. The stuttering starts when that scene fades out into Mr Flores in Manny's office. All cutscenes from then on are affected. :/

[Botje]

Are you in a position to recompile ResidualVM from source? Otherwise i'd say give the shader-based renderer a try.

If not, can you run the game with some kind of performance tracing tool so we can see which functions take up time?
I've used gDEBugger in the past with good results.