Fix for Prince of Persia: Sands of Time graphics

CB

I got The Prince of Persia pack from steam the other day, and today finally decided to play POP: SoT. The graphics were wonky. No matter how low I set the graphics options, I could not get it to behave like I have a modern video card. The graphics were laggy and skipping, as if my PC couldn't handle it. The issue made the game unplayable.

I searched the Interwebs for a solution, but could not find anyone else with the same problem (pehaps because it only just hit Steam a few days ago?).

So I tried several possible solutions before, through trial and error, I found the answer:

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time must be set to run on only one processor core in order to run properly.

I figured I'd put this here to help out anyone else who might run into the same problem in the future.

Ryder

Wow.. now that is an odd one for sure.

Gate28

System Shock 2 is the same way...unless you set it to run on one core, it totally crashes every 3 or 4 minutes.

CB

As an update, I had to do the same thing to get Prince of Persia: Warrior Within and Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones to work properly.

On a side note Warrior Within is not worth playing while the other two are pretty fun.

On another note: several of you have messaged me about the number of hours I've spent 'playing' Prince of Persia the last couple weeks. While I have been playing it a lot, The number is severely inflated because I've just been leaving the game running in the background while I do other things, so that I don't have to change the affinity again when I want to play later (for example: Steam says I played Warrior Within for 20 hours this week when, in fact, I only played for about three hours before deciding that it was too much fighting, and not enough jumping from ledge to ledge for my tastes).

Koreish

I'm not sure how far into Warrior Within you got but I found towards the end there was a lot more puzzles and running. Granted there is still more fighting than in the other two.

CB

I got to the Fight with the Empress of Time (First real boss) She was too difficult for me to beat. I had to give up. I think I could have done it eventually, but trying to win the fight stopped being fun. It was just too tedious, so I checked Wikipedia to read the story and moved on to Two Thrones, which I'm having a lot more fun with (i'm 90% finished).

ilyearer

I can't imagine why you would say Warrior Within isn't worth playing. I find it to be the one I like the most (if it weren't for the fact that SoT had a rather repetitive/restraining combat system, I wouldn't be able to decide between the two). The Dahaka was an amazing way of adding tension to the game as well as make me ask "how the hell is he going to get away from this thing?"

I know you said you read up on the rest of the game, but it's the nice plot change that happens after you defeat the Empress of Time that really adds to the game even more.

As for The Two Thrones, I didn't ever finish (just didn't get around to it), I found the addition of the Dark Prince and the pressure of dying from it made me looking at those sections as "how fast can I get out of this so I can get back to actually playing the game?" However, I recently picked the games back up (saw them on steam, remembered how much fun they were back on the PS2) and I'll get around to beating PoP: TTT later.

CB

As I said, the fight with the Empress was just too hard. I tried at least 20 times (proly a lot more) to beat her, and just couldn't figure it out. Something about the fight was just completely eluding me. It wasn't fun, so I quit.