Looks like an OpenGL problem, if nothing else works. This issue can appear on ATi cards according to drivers (and nVidia ones it seems too), actually. It may be because the game is running in OpenGL by default. The issue is that ATi has taken the habit of fiddling a lot with the opengl driver (or doing nothing to improve it). If you've got Alice for example, you will likely encounter choppy framerate too. It's been found most games using iDSoftware's OpenGL engine from Quake 2 or 3 will either be choppy, crash at launch, lock on the first screen...
You can try different things (if it's really what I'm thinking, it's been a long time now that solutions have been found, hopefully) - I've mainly tested first and second options, and they apparently don't interfere with gog.com's version (passed Lucko's chase for example):
- for one, update your driver to the very last one (12.4); on my rig, Anachronox works flawlessly with it (but it's not ideal for other old OpenGL games). That's the easiest way to go, but maybe only temporary.
- get the "atioglxx.dll" file from a previous driver; 12.1 was fine, according to vocab 11.12 too. The best one I've ever found though is from 9.11 (version: 6.14.10.9116). Sadly you can't find it easily on the internet now, so do the following (whatever the version):
=> go to
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/downloads.aspx select your OS, then "Previous drivers and softwares" on the right.
=> Download a driver (the display driver alone is enough if you can choose), then unzip it (it's quicker than launching installation and aborting) somewhere (right clic on driver package/[unzip with your dedicated software]). Do a search for "atioglxx" there. You will find "atioglxx.dl_".
=> it's actually a compressed file. Windows supports a command line to do that, the easiest way to go is to copy that (without quotes) "expand atioglxx.dl_ atioglxx.dll" into a text file. Rename it (without spaces) and change the extension .txt to .bat (validate the change). Put this new .bat file into the folder where "atioglxx.dl_" is, and launch it. The uncompressed file will appear here too ("atioglxx.dll" then).
=> copy this file to your game's folder (the root, it seems).
=> keep this (these) files somewhere. 9.11 mainly, is very reliable on any OpenGL games using a Quake engine.
=> while you're at it, do the same thing with the 12.4 driver (if installed, the .dll file is in Windows/System32 on a 32bits OS). This is the best solution!
- otherwise, download an OpenGL wrapper, such as TitaniumGL or GLDirect. They will "emulate" OpenGL into Direct3D. I've tried GLDirect, and it works almost flawlessly, apart from a quite noticeable tearing (that's why using an older ATi driver is better). Still, it's a very good alternative (also useful on nVidia cards). See
http://titaniumgl.tk/ for example.
- use a Glide wrapper, if possible. Maybe not ideal according to the original optimization of the game for Glide, but if the game is supported by the wrapper, at least you'll be able to play.
As for the high GPU usage vocab talked about, you could try forcing VSync. I've read about this solution on other forums and it often works (as it limits the number of frames per second).
Hope this helps!
