Titan Quest Works, IT Doesn't

[Lothur]

Older system but can play games like World in Conflict with no problem.

Installed two separate versions of TQ and IT (ie not Gold Edition).

The original Titan Quest plays if a bit choppy.

IT does the thing with the black screen to white screen with menu functional but not visible. With much fiddling about (clicking invisible menu items, alt+tab etc.) can eventually get to visible screen. Runs very choppy. Totally unplayable.

So how does one explain that one works and the other doesn't? I wouldn't think that IT would have that many changes to the engine that it suddenly overcame the hardware requirements of the system.

[Venger]

It might help if you post your system specs. Somebody might be able to spot a probable cause.

[Lothur]

I've been going back through the tech issues forums and it looks like IT just is more problematic than TQ.

I find this very odd - it's almost like they left some debug code in their release build or something for perf to degenerate that much on an expansion pack.

If I run IT in a window and watch process explorer CPU history it's evident that IT just pegs the CPU and doesn't let up even when idle. That's some crazy bad perf.

I tried the little trick with a small paging file on the C drive but I have my doubts about the logic for this. Windows does want to put crash dump info there but other than that I doubt that there's much utilization of that file.

There was a really interesting thread on how someone saw that IT was writing to map files on just about every UI interaction but nobody followed up on it. That's the kind of boneheaded perf error that makes sense in this situation.

What does seem to change things is shutting down AV and anti-spyware apps - the more I disable, the closer IT comes to being playable. Which is very strange since much more demanding games like World in Conflict don't seem to have such problematic interactions with these utilities. The latest build of Webroot Spy Sweeper has a context menu item called Gaming Mode which shuts off the relevant shields for 4 hours which is handy.

I think system specs are only moderately relevant for this problem - people mention playing IT on laptops that are certainly less capable than my system.

I think what's really happening is a very badly perf-tuned game which plays okay on recent systems because they have such overcapacity it conceals the non-hardware specific issues that cause this game to fail to run on moderate hardware. It could just be that IT is a giant memory hog but that's not entirely consistent with simply turning off AV and AS software as a solution: the software and supporting services are still memory resident so you aren't freeing up memory very much except maybe for any heap allocations they would be making while active.

It's more likely something in the IT message loop has a pathological interaction with insertion of AV and AS software into the IT process. I've seen this before for example with NOD32 and Azureus - together they would go into a CPU frenzy. Or it could be a bad interaction with file access monitoring especially if IT is opening, writing to, and closing files at some ridiculous rate.

In any case I'm still wondering if I'll continue playing since I get slight rubber-banding right at the beginning of the game which means it could be unplayable as the maps become more complex and it would be very frustrating to commit time to the game only to get blocked by issues that will never be resolved.

So for the record, my system specs are: AMD64 3200, 2GB RAM, and an ATI x1950 Pro. It's rock solid and amazingly plays most games just fine for an AGP-based system. For example, I play CoH almost every day with medium to high settings. There's no way IT could be more demanding than CoH.