All my laptops have had big trouble running Cold Waters since it was released. The game has been very slow, jerky and practically unplayable. The biggest issue has been that the GPU runs at 100%, something I have seen others complaining about as well. Every time I have tried to play it my laptop feels like it is going to melt, just hanging in the menu screen. And in game I have turned everything off.
I tried to get to the bottom of this and some forums were helpful. The problem seems to be a lack of fps limiter, as some of you may know. As I understand it has something to do with the unity engine. The game goes wild and tries to render as many frames as possible, even with Vsync on. If you don't have a good GPU in your laptop or a proper desktop the machine seems to struggle extremely. My laptop is not bad CPU or memory wise, but it has an integrated Intel GPU.
However, there is a fix to this that actually works great! I tried various fps limiters until I found one that works and is dead simple -
Dxtory. It is a lightweight movie capture program that resides in the taskbar, in the advanced bar you can choose to limit video to whatever fps you want. It then hooks in any game you start and (without recording anything)
actually limits the games own fps output! I found 20 fps is more than enough for a subsim like Cold Waters, and after setting 20 fps in Dxtory my GPU load is down to 60-70%,and the game runs great with some graphical effects enabled again. Now everything is smooth, fast and responsive in both game and menus. In short, I can finally play it! Just wish the devs could fix this internally.
If you experience similar problems or have a poor GPU in your laptop, this might be valuable to you.
