Performance Problems

[sixtyfive]

Hi!

I've bought the Collection when it came out, but have only now started playing Overture, which is awesome. The problem I have is basically lousy performance whenever "something" happens.

For example, while walking around and solving puzzles is all fine (there's no FPS counter, but I'd guess something between 20 and 30), whenever I get close to a dog or a spider the game becomes unplayable for all intents and purposes. Frame rate drops to something like one frame every one or two seconds and similar things happen to the sound. That makes it very frustrating to fight a dog or a spider, let alone sneak around them or outwit them (the problems practically start once you *hear* an animal and become worse once fight music sets in or you try to use the stealth mode).

Now, my PC will probably be pretty close to the minimum requirements (AMD Duron 1.7GHz, GeForce 6600LE w/256MB memory, 1GB RAM), but I'm running at 640x480 with all settings turned to their minimum, except for the shader, which is only set to "Low" instead of "Very Low" to keep at least a little bit of the game atmosphere intact.

On the software-side, I'm running a freshly installed Linux Mint 7 with no compositor enabled as suggested in http://frictionalgames.com/forum/showthr...p?tid=3049. Performance in other 3D-accelerated games is "normal". It should be mentioned that I'm not using the onboard soundcard at all, but instead play with USB headphones. The suggestion in http://frictionalgames.com/forum/showthr...p?tid=2837 only manages to disable sound, even though that does make the game feel faster during enemy encounters.

Is there anything I can do to improve performance, or is my PC just too bad?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Regards,
Raphael