Deus Ex

[HunterZ]

So my laptop (Dell XPS M1730) has XP on it, and I set up Windows 7 RC1 (build 7100) as dual-boot. I'm playing with running some various games from my XP partition, and have had varying degrees of success. World of Warcraft and Fallout 3 run fine, but I tried running some old games like Baldur's Gate and Deus Ex and had some issues.

For Deus Ex specifically, the game seems to run really slow. What I mean by slow is that everything moves in slow motion (maybe half speed at best?) even though I get an excellent framerate; it's apparent as soon as you see the Eidos logo at the beginning, but even moreso when you try to move around and jump (it's like walking on the moon). I'm trying to run the UTGLR D3D9 renderer at 1920x1200x32, but I also tried running in lower resolutions and/or with the default Direct3D renderer and the UTGLR OpenGL renderer. I only saw it run at full speed once, and I wasn't able to replicate it (and it was with the default D3D renderer anyways so I wasn't too interested).

I tried turning off anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, and mucking with lots of the advanced options for the D3D9 renderer - all to no avail. I also tried running in various compatibility modes and in administrator mode (although I already gave full access to Everyone to the Deus Ex folders) and setting affinity to a single core, but still saw the slowdown in every case.

I should mention that it runs great in WinXP.

 

[HunterZ]

Possible solution here:
Deus Ex speed issues fixed! - Steam Users' Forums
Launchers for Unreal Engine 1 Games

 

[Dragor1]

Funny though that Intel's Speed stepping is interfering with games.

I have Intel Speed step enabled in bios but it doesn't affect the performance of my copy of Unreal Gold (Unreal 1 Engine game, of course!).

But then again, I am on a desktop and on a Balanced power plan. You may try to switch to the balanced power plan and see whether it makes any difference, at the expense of battery charge!

Hope this helps! Thanks for your time!

 

[HunterZ]

Thanks for the suggestions. I always run on AC power (never on the battery) because my laptop is so power-hungry that it'd probably go dead in 30 minutes of playing a Direct3D/OpenGL game. I'm running with the high performance power plan at the moment, and I don't think there's a difference between balanced and high for AC power anyways?

I want to try the fix I posted but unfortunately I'm at work at the moment.

 

[HunterZ]

The custom launcher seemed to work, although when I had another game (WoW) running in the background the sound was choppy.

Also, at some point it would only flash white when I tried to run Deus Ex. It started working fine when I ran it in WinXP SP3 compatibility mode.

 

[HunterZ]

One small update: Running in XP compatibility mode made the middle mouse button nonfunctional in-game, and prevented me from being able to activate Ventrilo's push-to-talk via the Home key while Deus Ex was the foreground application. I turned off the compatibility mode checkbox and it ran fine (weird since it didn't before).