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.

i have the same problem. in this village where you start everythings fine at first. after about ten minutues it gets slower, i switched to task manager, set priority of the .exe to normal and assigned all cores. helped a little bit, i think.
but after you port to the next terrain, it gets horrible, ESPECIALLY when you encounter enemys, aiming is HELL!
win7-x64 as well.

Same problem here, after 5 to 10 minutes the game becomes unplayable.

There are some suggestions on this page :
http://www.openoutcast.org/wp/
For the slowdown\core affinity suggestions, a free alternative to CPU Killer is CPU Speed Adjuster :
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/System-Tweak/CPU-Speed-Adjuster.shtml
AMD have their own core affinity utility, others can use something like runfirst :
http://www.activeplus.com/Products/RunFirst

I will try on my laptop as soon as I can (Vista 32bits), but I hope it's not that 'cause I hate playing on a laptop…

Have you guys tryed the usual running it under different compatibility settings like windows xp?

Yes it already runs in win98 compatibility (for the hi res patch).
Before you ask, no it's not the hi-res patch, I tried with the gog version "out of the box", the result is the same.
Well, I try the game on my laptop now.

Thanks very much for the tip - And indeed, thanks to everyone for the assistance and the feedback. Maybe Win7 isn't to blame, in this case.
Unfortunately, the CPU killer application only makes things run slower. I've never seen it actually increase the smoothness of play.
And I'm currently running everything under Win98 Compat mode, but that doesn't seem to be helping...

Well try windows xp compatibility mode and even try turning it off altogether just to check what happens.

ok i did 2 tests, first my desktop on seven 64bits with one core and 3go of ram (instead of 4 core and 4go of ram), still unplayable…
On my laptop with vista 32 bits (turion x2 tl-56 and 2go of ram) it seems ok, I certainly need to test more to be sure, but so far so good. (except the fact I never succeeded to play on a laptop… ).
So if we have all a 64bits system it's certainly the problem.

Hardly that.
I'm running it on a E6850 4gb RAM rig and it works like a charm, no slowdowns. On win7 x64.
Has to be something else.

Win7 Ultimate 64 bit here and no issues whatsoever with Outcast.

Ok it would be too easy if it was that ^^
Maybe the quad core but as I said I tried with only 1 core and the result is the same…
Strange…

You should try contacting GoG support.