How I Fixed My Performance Issues in Shroud of the Avatar (Yep, My PC’s Getting Old)

I was playing Shroud of the Avatar lately and, like a lot of folks have noticed, it’s not the smoothest game out there. Maybe it’s the game’s optimization, maybe it’s just that my PC’s starting to show its age—probably both. So I decided to try something I’d heard good things about: DXVK. Turns out, it was easy to set up and legit helped.

Here’s my story:

What was going on

My rig = older GPU + CPU = struggling a little. The game ran, but felt clunky: little stutters, occasional weird frame drops, that “game just feels off” vibe. Since I already knew the game might be poorly optimized, I figured the two-pronged problem: the game and my hardware. So I went looking for something low-risk to try.

That’s when I found DXVK — a lightweight “translation layer” that lets games using Direct3D 9/10/11 talk through the Vulkan API. On paper it sounded perfect for an older rig like mine.

What I did

No big setup, just these steps:

• I downloaded the latest DXVK release.
• I unzipped it and grabbed the required DLLs (for my game version — x64 in this case).
• I copied the necessary DXVK DLLs into the same folder where Shroud’s .exe sits.
• I launched the game, played for about an hour and kept an eye on how things felt.

And yep — it worked. No weird crashes, no big hassle.

What changed

• The game felt smoother. The stutters got milder, responsiveness improved. Big win.
• That said: the game still showed Very High power usage on my PC. That did not change. But to be fair — it was doing that even before I installed DXVK.
• So the bottom-line: DXVK helped the rendering/API overhead, but the underlying hardware is still old. The GPU/CPU/thermals/power draw—those are still what they are.
• Also worth noting: DXVK’s official target is more for Linux (Wine/Proton), but it can help on Windows in some situations.

My takeaways

• If you’ve got an older PC and you’re running a game that doesn’t work great, trying DXVK is super easy. It took me minutes. If it works — bonus. If not — you just remove the DLLs and go back.
• Don’t expect miracles though. It won’t turn a five-year-old laptop into a beast. If you’re bottlenecked elsewhere (GPU, CPU, memory, heat, power) you’ll still feel that.
• Make sure your GPU supports Vulkan and that your drivers are up to date—DXVK leans on that stuff.
• If you try it and you don’t see improvement (or run into issues), you can always undo the change. No harm done.

Final thoughts

So yeah — if you’re in the same boat I was (older PC + a game that’s not running great), give DXVK a shot. For me, it was worth the 10-minute effort. 

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