The Stack

Myst V: End of Ages has been sitting on the stack waiting to be played for a few days now while I finished up Rhem. There’s some kind of be-careful-what-you-wish-for thing going on here. In my first post on Rhem, I wondered if it would be better with a 3D graphics engine. Myst V has such an engine, and it’s causing me no end of grief. I just can’t seem to sustain a playable framerate, even when I turn all the graphics settings down to minimum. A session might start at about 20 FPS ¹ All framerate figures here were obtained using FRAPS. (not great, but something I can get used to), but it always gradually decays to an inevitable plateau of 6-7 FPS, even if I return to the location where I was getting the 20 FPS initially.

My machine exceeds the game’s minimum requirements in every respect, and the Ubisoft forums show that people with less powerful systems than mine have gotten it to run smoothly without problems. But I’ve gone through the measures prescribed by tech support, and nothing helps. I’m starting to wonder if I turned off some driver setting in order make an older game run and forgot to turn it on again, but I can’t find any trace of such a thing.

Anyway, I’m shelving it for now. Maybe some ideas about how to get it running smoothly will turn up.