The game is choppy

[Kastratore]

At first i would like to say hi to all, since it's my first post here. And now we can proceed to my problem.

As you can read in the title, my game is choppy. You know, animations are lagging, scrolling is painfully slow and such. What is more interesting, the biggest choppiness starts after i load the game, then it gives up a little (it's not running perfectly smooth, especially with lots of action on screen, but it's bearable). And then after an hour or so it strikes again (maybe it's the developer's way to remind me, that I need to get off the computer for a while, cause this game IS addictive)

So here are my machine's specs:
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T6600 @ 2.20GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.2GHz
Memory: 4096MB RAM
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GT 240M

I own the Complete version of the game from steam, which is patched with last patches.
I've tried running the game as an admin, disabling visual composition and running it in win xp compatibility mode. Sadly, that didn't help me.

 

[Civ99]

Hmmmm, Does other games act up like this?

 

[wilebill]

Have you tried assigning the game to just one core? To try this, game needs to be running, open Task Manager, go to the Processes tab, find the game process and right click on it. Choose Set Affinity and then only one core should be checked, usually other than "0" and see what happens. Don't know what happens if you mess with Priority but probably nothing good.

If this does fix the problem, there is a utility called Runfirst.exe that you can get here.

Right click on the desktop icon and select Properties. Under Shortcut you will see target with the game path in quotes. Precede this with the runfirst.exe path in quotes. Like:

"c:\whatever\runfirst.exe" "c:\whateveritis\game.exe", apply changes and save.

Even if core affinity does not work for you, Runfirst.exe is still worth knowing about. It has worked for me on some older games. Good luck.