extremly slow game

[vdf]

Hi there,

In principle, I think the game works for me, but it is _extremely_ slow, ie. to start the
turturial from the desktop takes approx. 10 minutes. I think my computer is some way above the requirements, but I have included a dxdiag file. Except for AVG free antivirus, no other programs are running in background (well, except for the various windows xp processes). What gives?

[Terl]

Just a quick look at the dxdiag and the one thing that jumped out is the ATI graphics driver is from 2007. You might want to try updating that one. When you are there you will see they have a message about the card being legacy but there are drivers just follow along.

After that you may want to try a disk cleanup and defrag; I know it has helped me before.

[Ntronium]

vdf, can you be a bit more specific. Is that 10 minutes the time from clicking the shortcut to the game's menu displaying, or the time from selecting the tutorial in the menu until it starts.

[vdf]

@Terl, thank you for the advice, I'll try updating the driver tonight and report what happens.

@Ntronium, It's 10 minutes from clicking on the desktop shortcut, until after the first three dialog boxes of the tutorial, that is, until the point where I have to start doing things on my own in the tutorial ("have a quick look around and double click on earth" I think). The game menu (when starting the game) comes up rather quickly (~1 min), but the tutorial takes forever to load. Once I have to start actually playing, the game slows down even further, ie. 1 fps when moving around the star map, 20+ min to open the options (they hadn't shown up after 20 minutes, and I killed the program).

I think the problem is in the graphics, because if I change the resolution to 1024x768 its slightly faster, but still unplayable...

[vdf]

Oh, well updated the graphics driver and everything runs like a dream - you'd think I would have learned that trick by now...

Thank you for the advice Terl

[Terl]

Most welcome. I learned through many trials and errors