WhatIsSol: Sounds like a graphic driver issue to me, but unfortunately other than saying to make certain to update your drivers to the latest, I don't have any more suggestions.

For myself, I have seen something akin to this stutter you are talking about but it only seems to happen immediately during startup and a restart of the game fixes it every time. I have seen it happen maybe once or twice the entire time I have played the game, which has been over a year now.

I would say - you should post your system specs since that would allow someone else having similar hardware/software to maybe make a more constructive comment.

Sorry, that I can not provide a definite answer.

Just for reference here is what I'm running on: i7-2600k, 16GB memory, Windows 10, 970gtx 4GB card

Septimis: Hello,

Upon starting the game, everything runs smoothly, from main menu to actually entering the strategic view on a game. Whether loading a game or starting a new game, I begin to get graphical stuttering after about 2 minutes, and FPS drop that increases the longer I play. This drop and stutter will occur every couple of seconds and last for about half a second to a second. This eventually makes the game unplayable. If I then quit back to the main menu, the menu screen then also stutters. This is only resolved by restarting the game. But once I start playing a game again, the same issues occur after the same period of time. Changing graphic settings to the lowest settings does not resolve this issue.

Does anyone else experience this? Does anyone know of a solution??

I would appreciate any help, as I love the Master of Orion games and would like to continue playing this. But thtis issue is making the game unplayable.

hav00k: Excuse me from bringing this from graveyard, but I was suffering from the same problem so i thought it might be helpful to post my solution. Win10 x64 here.

There is a "d3d9.dll" file inside the game directory. Remove the file or rename it something like "d3d9.dll.bak".

I do not know exactly why it causes performance issues in the GoG version of the game, but I have a clue (not going to extrapolate here though). I also find it a strange decision to ship the game with a DirectX component inside the executable directory, effectively overriding the one coming from the OS.