[2023] Game lagging from purchase

First please unload GeForce Experience if running.


THEN Right click on ck3.exe , properties, compatibility. Tick "disable fullScreen optimisations" untick every other box in that dialog, Apply and exit.

Then in the launcher Game Settings menu, select fullScreen display mode, Vsync off, cap refresh rate at 60.


Is that any better? test with a new campaign, not any existing one, and with ALL mods disabled.  

Can I get new copies of these file splease, since the changes

DXDIAG is a program you run from the Windows search box on the task bar. After running it will open a window and start collecting info with a progress bar in the lower-left corner. When it completes click the 'save all information' button and save it to a file then attach that file here.

Please attach here your Documents/Paradox Interactive/CK3/pdx_settings.txt .
From your Documents/Paradox Interactive/CK3/logs/ folder, attach here system.log , error.log

Please report the temperatures of your CPU and video (GPU)
1/ before starting the game up and
2/ after say 10 minutes' play.
If your PC's vendor has given you no way of reading temperatures, install
SPEEDFAN http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php  

If nothing ever gets up near 80c then overheating is not the problem. Which is a shame as it's often the easiest thing to fix!

That settings file seems to show that the refresh rate is not capped - did you set it at 60? What actual rate are you seeing in the game?


Assuming that doesn't help, please install and run the free utility Speccy. Send its output to a text file and attach that here please.


Then, run Task Manager in Windows, go into Performance. Run the game from Steam and in the launcher Game Settings area put the game in Windowed mode and lower the resolution so you can see TM as you play the game.

When you get this lagging, can you see what component is getting high util in time with the lags - GPU, CPU, IO, network, memory - anything?  

WarWombat said: Just realised that although I set refresh rate in the launcher to 60, I hadn't set the FPS limit in the game itself.

Setting it in the launcher ought to set it in the game too!

WarWombat said: I've ran the game while watching TM. There aren't any spikes but in fact when the game lags, my CPU and GPU both drop. The CPU, which was hitting a max of ~74% dropped to 30% and the GPU from ~25% to 12%. Everything else seems unaffected.

Really ... that almost sounds like there is something else happening in WIndows, software or hardware, to take attention away from the game on that schedule.

WarWombat said: Attached is the Speccy output.

Can you try disabling BitDefender AV and firewall, or even removing it all together for testing purposes? At the least make sure it is not doing realtime scans of the Steam CK3 or Documents CK3 locations.

Disable the Discord overlay.

Right click on Documents in the left column of File Explorer, just under This PC there. Go to properties, location. What does it say in there? If it's on OneDrive that can be a problem too.  

WarWombat said: the location for documents is currently set to "C:\Users\Harry\Desktop"

Desktop? Not Documents? Odd if so but I guess not an issue as such.

See if a new Speccy output still shows BD running; AV apps are notoriously hard to completely uninstall as that's what some malware tries to do. If it still shows there, use Ccleaner and Revo Uninstaller to completely remove it.

If that doesn't help at all, I cannot see wat in this machine/Windows setup is causing this to you, I am sorry!  

Well, we can't report it as a bug unless we think it is likely to be a game bug - QA would have to reproduce it locally to pass onto the developers, which I'm quite sure they would not be able to do (or everyone would get this!).

Make a new Windows user on this machine and log into it with that - does it still happen?