So I'm a crazy dude that collects retro laptops for retro gaming. And to add some sense to this hobby I play some games i've missed back then. And Vietcong Fist Alpha is one of those. I've played the original game in 2003, really loved it, but missed the expansion. So here I'm.
I've installed the original game, installed expansion, i've got official patch 1.6. I'm playing in 1024x768, in 32bit, and don't use 16bit textures. My PC is:
- Intel® Core™ Duo Processor T2400 (2M Cache, 1.83 GHz)
- ATI Mobility Radeon X1900 (36 Pixel / 8 Vertex; 256Mb GDDR3; 256Bit)
- 17.1 inch 16:10, 1440x900 (Samsung LTN170X2-L02)
- 2x 1Gb PC2-5300 DDR2-SDRAM SO-DIMM
- SSD
- Windows XP Sp 3
And the game runs horribly in some scenes. Let's just take starting scene of the game, two dudes in the camp. It's 20fps!
I thought maybe a laptop from 2006 is too new for it and I need a native DX8 videocard so I took a laptop from 2004 with Pentium m (1600) and GeForce 4200. It was the same!
Then I took a laptop from 2001 with Pentium 3 (1000) and GeForce 2go (MX) and it was also bad.
I don't get it. Such an old game should run fluently on my pc. I've installed Mafia, cause it's the same developer, and it's stable at 60 fps.
Unfortunately, my knowledge isn't good enough to give you good advises about such a problem but, in my opinion, if you try to run Vietcong with a pc of the same "age" as the game, I'm not really surprised to know you have rather low fps... At its release, Vietcong was already very "demanding".
So, why not simply run the game on a more recent and powerfull pc? VCStarter is also there to make it running on more modern OS! And with VCStarter 1.70 BETA (in the tools section), the game should run flawlessly!
I think the main issue is that Vietcong can not use multiple cpu cores.
So it is as if you only had a 1,83Ghz singlecore-cpu.
Thats a thing with a lot of laptops, that they tend to have more cores instead of a high clock to save energy.
Upgrading to 4GB of RAM (32bit WinXP's limit) is one thing you could try, but then again I'm pretty sure the CPU is the bottleneck.
The graphicscard sounds good enough though.
