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Hey guys. I'm an avid fan of the Thief series and I have the 3 Thief (1 to 3) games installed on my computer. Thief 1 and 2 use pretty much the same engine and I've grown used to them not being perfectly smooth on my modern computers, despite my CPUs and GPUs for the past few years being more than capable of fluidly running these games. However, I've noticed something strange lately. Every time I have Chrome open the game would be perfectly smooth. As in perfect. Fluid. When I close Chrome the choppiness/stuttering returns. I've been noticing Thief 1/2 play fluidly for a while now but it's only now that I've nailed down what causes it. I'm not complaining; I'd much rather have T1/T2 play fluidly, of course, but why is it like this? They're both 16-bit color games, btw. Perhaps there's a bug in the graphics drivers that's causing the choppiness/stutters and it could be fixed by having Chrome open? I'm using the latest Catalyst (non-beta) 13.12, Chrome version 33.0.1750.117 m, the latest as of this post. My specs are on my signature. I wonder if Nvidia owners are also experiencing this, although I reckon very few people even bother to play these old games these days. Could this also be related to the frame-pacing issues found in Radeon drivers? Thanks.

Strange. It could be that your CPU doesn't run at 'boost speed' or even throttles without the additional load of Chrome. Older games tend to be single-threaded so clock speed will play an important role in performance. Use a tool like CPU-Z to see if that's the case.

I don't currently have an AMD system but I thinkit would be possible to create a gaming profile within Catalyst that prevents any throttling or even runs at 'boost speed' when playing those games.

Have you tried TFix? http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134733

@puppetworx: Thanks for replying. It can't be CnQ or CPU throttling at work. I tried turning it off in the BIOS, with the CPU running constantly at 4.1GHz according to CPU-Z. Still the same. And Thief 1 and 2 will crash unless it's running on only one core so every time I run them I have to go to Task Manager to set core affinity to just one of the eight cores. I use whichever core I feel like using and don't stick to just one core all the time.

@TwistedKestrel: Yeah, I have the Thief patch that vastly improves the game and even makes it run using 24-bit color. I've tried the patch before and Thief Gold runs very smoothly, but it just doesn't feel like the Thief I've known and loved for ages so I'm not using it this time. I've reformatted my PC since so there couldn't be any remnants of the patch left. Thanks for sharing though.