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 would certainly do this, but I am running on Windows 7. As GOG explicitly says that Windows 7 is not supported, I'm guessing it would be a waste of time to ask for support on an unsupported operating system.

Same here… I will certainly play the game on my laptop with the keyboard/mouse/screen plugged in.

Whoa, sorry about that. For some reason I was convinced Win7 was officially supported.

No worries. I sure wish it was officially supported, though.
Does anyone know if my assumption here is correct? Will GOG default tell me "No" if I'm on Win 7? I'm tempted to ask for a refund after figuring this out, but it hardly seems worth the hassle, at this point.

Possible fix:
Do not:
Load your game or tab out then back in again.
If I stick to this rule I don't get the framerate drops. I have Win7 64bit.

How's the framerate if you disable the sound? (by switching to the integrated chip, to make sure the Audigy driver isn't used)

I was having horrible framerates in my first combat encounter and it turns out it works well if I don't tab out (I've been doing that alot :-P). Thanks a lot for the tip :)

I never tab out of the game at all, so no worries there.
I'm a little confused by what you mean when you say "Do not: Load your game", though. Do you really mean to play the entire game through in one sitting??
I'll try playing the game without sound later tonight to see if the audigy is the issues, though!

What I meant was that if you're in the game and do something bad so you want to load your game, that's a bad idea.
Loading from the startup menu is fine.

My tip seemed to work earlier but doesn't work anymore... this is frustrating, did anyone find a solution?
nVidia 9800GX2
Win7 64-bit

I'm still having this problem after all this time, sadly. However, since GOG now support windows 7, and also because I'm pretty sure this problem isn't Windows 7 exclusive, I've sent a message off to their support staff. I'll post the results of my inquiry as soon as I hear a reply!

strange the game runs perfectly on my windows 7 64 bit PC.
Ive even applied the 640x480 fullscreen patch.

Here are my system specs:

Intel i3 540 3.2 ghz ocd @3.8ghz
ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB
Gigabyte H55M-S2H
4GB DDR3 Ram

What resolution are you running Outcast in? If your running the hi-res patch (1280 and higher) then your going to get slowdown. Even on a supercomputer. The engine was just not made to push that many voxels on screen regardless of the power of your GPU.

Try dropping down the reso to the stock ones and see if it picks up. I know it will look pretty nasty, but it will answer the question.

CPU: AMD Turion(tm) X2 Ultra Dual-Core Mobile ZM-82 2.20Ghz
Screen res.: 800x600 (around 25-30 FPS)

Higher res. are unplayable on my notebook :(

I was getting the slowdown even without the high res patch, just running the vanilla install right from GOG. I made this thread before I ever installed the high res patch. The slowdown persists even without installing it.

Lately I've tried to play through the slowdown, thinking maybe it will resolve itself. Unfortunately this invariably leads to a crash in OC3.exe - I'm beginning to wonder if this is an x64 issue.

Still no reply from GOG on this, either...