Low FPS and stuttering in older RTS games

Hi..

I'm still playing old games and recently i decided i wanted to play Red alert 2 and try out age of mythology, but both has some problems.. Red Alert 2 gives insane fps drops, especially at explosions (its huge fps drops, defnitely not normal) and age of mythology really stutters a lot unless i play it at the absolute worst graphics settings.

Anyway... So i tried out an old nvidia driver (currently using the newest 186.03) and apparently it seemed that age of mythology wasnt giving this extreme constant stutter, altho red alert 2 was still having the fps problem...

The specs:
CPU: P8400 2,26 GHz
GPU: 9600M 512MB
RAM: 4GB DDR2
HDD: 500GB 5400RPM

Im currently using Win7 64bit.. altho it happens in xp 32bit too noexpression.gif.. atleast the Red alert 2 issue does..


Does these oldschool games just hate my video card or vice versa?


Thanks


EDIT: Now here some months after, i checked another topic and saw a guy who had a solution, atleast to the issue in RA2:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5541308&postcount=20

Just posting it here to help anyone who stumbles across this topic.

 

for age of mythology, the video card hates it. for red alert 2, your cpu hates it. I have a P7350 2.0ghz and i get insane fps drops too. this should fix it but if it doesn't, then i don't know. do this, download get and set affinity and after starting the game, set the number of cores working on red alert 2 to 1. see if it still gives you insane drops

 

Try to use RMClock to lock the CPU at one constant speed and use the task manager to set the game cpu affinity to only one core.

 

Thanks for the answers.

Woah cheng arent we unlucky, lol. I just deleted RA2 im gonna try and install again tho and test the affinity thing. Also i installed Titans for AOM, and it fixed the stutter it seems..

Ayle
Thanks for the suggestion, luckily i already run at high performance constantly and set CPU to constant same speed in rmclock.

 

I have the same problem on my system, unbelievable haha, go to task manager and ensure the affinity(right click on the thread) has only one cpu checked, mine usually has eight so it gets super confused and it lags, and try setting vsync in Nvidia control panel so it doesnt have like 700 FPS running.

Clocking down is also a good idea.

 

Aww, nothing worked, not affinity nor vsync... This game is so much not worth the trouble

 

This will work 100% and I have found that it is the only way so far. Install Windows XP SP2 into a VMware workstation virtual environment and then install Red Alert 2 or any other old game similar and it will run without any slow downs.

VMware is payware so you could always try other virtual environments that are freeware or the free one that comes with Windows 7.

 

Virtualbox i'd try.. But i didnt knew gfx drivers worked in virtual os'?

Thanks

 

This is just a random guess, but maybe it'll work better if you run the .exe of the game in compatibility mode for XP or even older.....(not positive that Windows 7 have this option but it should)

 

That won't make any difference for Red Alert 2, the stuttering problems during explosions and such will still occur.

 

Games like Red Alert 2 and Tiberian Sun (the ones I play most) within a virtual environment only need Direct3D, the graphics drivers don't need to be installed directly.

I play Tiberian Sun, Firestorm, Red Alert 2 + many excellent mods (about 15 different ones), the best being Total War.

I was very surprised when I found that all of these games worked within a virtual environment in Windows 7 without any lagg, I mean zero lag, no crashes and full resolution.

VirtualBox might not be the same but it is worth trying.

 

That is really strange as RA2 AND RA3 ran pretty decently on my 1.6 ghz Toshiba with Integrated Graphics, maybe your graphics card has compat. issues with them?

 

Well ye sure its not the power of the computer, the game just hate the CPU or GPU i dunon.. Oh well.. Screw the game

Thanks for all your answers guys

 

Don't forget that those games were designed to run in Windows 98 OS so of course they don't like the powerful CPU/GPU's of today.

However, once you get them installed inside of a Virtual OS, they actually run even better. I was glad I made the effort since those games are just great!

 

Yeah the games obviously is made for completely different hardware... Still weird they dont somehow fix classics like these games..

Yeah i might just to that too actually