I and several others in my friend group have an issue of game stuttering when playing via Voobly, and for me this has been a problem for about a year. Essentially, the game stutters, or pauses periodically. Early game it's not bad at all, but late game it stutters every couple seconds for 1-3 seconds at a time. The amount that it stutters also varies from game to game seemingly randomly. During a "stutter", the entire game freezes for all players, including mouse movement. The only way I know it's me and not someone else causing it is because other players say it never happens when I'm not in the game. This only occurs on my desktop - it doesn't occur on my laptop. I have tried what I think is an exhaustive list of attempts to fix the issue, including:

Going 1-by-1 through Voobly compatibility settings, testing each until i started getting stutters
Going through program compatibility settings (running for Windows XP compatibility, running in admin mode, etc.)
Disabling G-sync
Playing game with just 1 monitor set up
Completely fresh/clean install of Windows
Installing Voobly and WK both through steam and through the original game CD
going into task manager and setting game affinity to just 1 CPU (and also setting priority to realtime)
Using a different GPU (GTX 1080 Ti)

I checked the task manager to ensure that my CPU isn't approaching 100%... it's usually only around 30% usage during the game and when a stutter happens. Below are my system specs:

OS: Windows 10 (most recent updates)
CPU: Core i5 3570k
RAM: 16 GB
HDDs: Mix of SSDs, hard drives (AOE and Windows installed on SSD)
GPU: GTX 970
NIC: 1 Gbps on-board ethernet
ISP: Comcast, 300 Mbps

I'm kind of at my wit's end here on what to do and am tired of lagging games out, and am literally considering purchasing a new PC in hopes of working around the issue. However, like I said it's several people in my friend group that seem to be experiencing it. This stuttering is a performance issue that has never happened on AOE HD on this system so it seems to be something that disagrees between this ancient game engine and my PC hardware. I can try to add in a twitch clip or something to demonstrate the stuttering if needed.

Edit: It looks like I made a thread about this about 8 months ago: https://www.voobly.com/forum/thread/298659

To clarify, I have tried the suggestions given since that post with the exception of the GPU driver. I will go try an older driver version now and report on whether it makes a difference, but in the mean time other suggestions are welcome!

Edit 2: I updated the GPU driver to the most recent stable version with no luck..

Hi mate,

Your PC configuration is even too good for an old game like aoe2

Going back to your issue,, i had similar issue with the hardware acceleration when at some point the game was very laggy and my mouse mooves at shots in the late game, and disabeling or enabeling fixed the issue.

Since windows 10 delete the "Display" feature in the control panel (where was located the hardware acceleration option), try to search in your GXT setting option related to hardware acceleration or 3D rendering settings (since windows 10 disable display feature actually any GPU have each settings related to the specific driver, so can't tell you exactly where is located).

There is also a setting in voobly about the hardware acceleration in the game room option in this configuration that is suggest to follow: [You must login to view link]

[Thread Closed]

Thanks for the response. I was unable to locate the hardware acceleration features within Windows. I'm not sure if that's because those features are specific to an integrated GPU or if that control is simply outdated and removed from the Windows distribution. I also had another peek around the Nvidia control panel to see if there was any way to disable or change hardware acceleration with no luck. Last, I checked the disable hardware acceleration box under the voobly game room DX settings. Essentially, there was no change in performance when I did that.

Hello Superfluous!

1. Go to the path C: \ Program Files (x86) \ Microsoft Games \ Age of Empires II \ SaveGame \ Multi
2. Delete all * .mgs and * .msx files in that directory except the Multi.txt file.

Let me know if it made any difference,

Regards
Eric