Hi everyone. Sorry if I'm cluttering up the forum, but this issue is really starting to make it hard to enjoy Outcast - And that's something I've wanted to do for over ten years now!
After a long bout of crashing, I finally was able to get the game to run and play reasonably by choosing the loader's options for resolution. The black frame isn't too terrible in my opinion. The game played well through the intro, in the first area where you talk to the Talan and go through Jan's trials. As soon as I hit the portal, though, things took a turn...
Out in the riss fields the game began to get a little slower - But only during times when I'd rotate the camera. Running in a straight ahead line was fine and dandy, but turning made things choppy.
When I hit my first combat encounter, the game became such a slide-show that I couldn't even see what really happened before I died. It was literally unplayable when combat began and everyone was running everywhere. I can't see playing the game with this framerate - let alone enjoying it. It runs fine in most areas, but if combat is unworkable, that's sort of a deal breaker.
I don't know what I can really do, at this point. Ten years ago I decided Outcast was out of my league because my computer couldn't run it. If my CPU and RAM aren't good enough to play it now I don't know what more I can do!
Here are my specs (I can go into more detail, but I doubt it will help):
- Intel i7-920 CPU
- 6 GB DDR3 RAM
- x58 EVGA Motherboard
- EVGA GTX 275 GPU
- Soundblaster Audigy Sound Card
- Windows 7 x64
I guess this is one of those cases where it'll get blamed on Windows 7. Anyhow, if anyone has any advice other than 'Change your operating system', I'd really appreciate it! Thanks.

Maybe so, but I've never seen anything similar to the AMD x2 timing issue with the i7. That particular AMD issue was much more widespread than a single game, after all.

Additionally, the degradation of game performance over time leads me to think that perhaps a memory leak is happening. Monitoring resource use during gameplay with Process Explorer hasn't shown the entire system using much more than 1.5 GB, though.

Hey all, I've got this problem as well. Here are my laptop's specs:

Intel Core Due CPU P8400 @ 2.26GHz 2.27GHz
4 GB RAM
1 GB Geforce 9800M GTS

I'm running the high resolution patch, but it starts out silky smooth and only slows down after 5 minutes or so, so I doubt processing power is the problem. I'm also running Vista 64-bit, so it's not just a Windows 7 problem. I never ALT-Tab out since that crashes my game on resume, so that's not it either. I also shut off virtually all programs and services running in the background.

Anyone know if a solution has been found for this yet?

Just thought I'd bump this in case someone finds a fix but forgets to share.

Lots of us still having this problem. 5 minutes of in-game time means slideshow.

Not really playable.

=(


EDIT: I disabled all compatibility modes for OC1,2,3 and Launcher.exe

It fixed the framerate. Fantastic!