If you have a consistently smooth experience over many hours in a single session, may I ask which CPU you have?

I get CPU creep on a single core (just like League of Legends) my 10-core 10900K 5,00 GHz all-core OC, until that core reaches 100 % utilization and the stuttering begins. Restart the game and all is fine again, for a time.

From what I've read, the game engine doesn't like "too fast" CPUs (typically anything above 2-2,5 GHz) and is too old to benefit from 4+ core systems. Whatever the reason, I am getting progressively worse performance over time.

While I haven't sat down and really troubleshot the issue, the game, with such an old game engine, runs impressively good without any major technical issue. Very few CTDs or soft-locks. And true, game works fine on Windows 10, without any compatibility issues.

I keep mixing up patch 1.52 and 1.54, but it's the exact same patch as I understand it, only numbered differently due to origin platform (GoG / Steam).

i7 7700, so somewhat old at this point. But still a decent speed (3.6-4.2 GHz).

As for the stuttering, I haven't encountered it even if I spend 2-3 hours without interruptions on some maps. If you mean overall game session and not just one map, you can easily make that 8+ hours. I can even alt-tab without the game breaking (running in fullscreen mode).

I've had some very occasional crashes (mostly at merchants and once in combat) but other than that, nothing.

The only issue I have is that I can't exit the game normally. If I try through the main menu, I am greeted with a black screen that is impossible to get rid of, no matter what. The system still works in the background, but not even Task Manager or the CTRL+ALT+DELETE screen shows up. The only thing I can do at that point is PC restart. Funnily enough, the restart process closes the stuck game window and I can see the system for a second before it reboots :) I have to quit the game through task manager in main menu and kill the process to "exit safely".

It is the GOG 1.54.75000 version.

A tip on the black screen thing (ironically another thing that also happens with League of Legends), open Task Manager and make sure it's set to "Always on top". It's a check mark under Options that is off by default. Do that, and Task Manager will forcibly place itself on top of a black screen when you Alt+Tab to it.

I play everything I can in windowed mode. I know I lose a bit of performance, as Windows resource management prioritizes fullscreen applications by default, but as I typically multitask across 3 monitors (or sometimes 5, if I use all of them), not having everything else go black if I play in fullscreen on one of them is a worthwhile tradeoff overall.

Playing in windowed mode is also a workaround when a game goes into a black screen soft-lock, though it requires a second monitor to be a useful way of terminating a locked application. As you can then Alt+Tab to the second screen and open Task Manager from that.

As for performance over time, I feel the need to restart the game every 3-4 hours to have the smoothness stay persistent. After 8 hours on the 10900K (and I've tried many times to leave the game running overnight to grind resources) - and I didn't have this issue on my old CPU, a 3770K - it's all but unplayable due to severe stuttering.

I haven't tried yet to create a downclocked profile in Intel XTU, like 2,00 GHz, and change the affinity to have the game run on only 2 cores.

Doesn't help when the game is in full screen. I've had Task Manager to be always on top for a couple years now. Once I click exit and the black screen appears, there is actually nothing that can be done other than reboot or restart. No key combination or trick I know is capable of doing anything. It's like the window is still eating all the inputs so nothing gets to the system.

Swapping to windowed might help but eh... The game doesn't offer the option by default and it's not really worth setting it up to launch it windowed for such an avoidable thing. I already got used to exiting the game through the task manager anyway :)

In that case, I have had some luck with Alt+Tab to de-select the black screen window and press Win+D to minimize everything to desktop.

I have my SpellForce .exe set with
-windowmode

...in the Target box, and manually edited the resolution in the .ini file to get 2560x1440.

Apparently, both of these things will be made inherently available in the 1.61 patch. Native widescreen, yay!
It's good to have a solution, but I would be going on the wall for the one time I forgot and had to restart the PC as a result. Something I almost never do, which Windows Update constantly nags me about. ^^

I'm playing on the vanilla 1600x1200. Hate stretching things that were not made for widescreen into widescreen. I have no problem playing old games in 4:3.

So windowed isn't really an option for me either. But I can try it to see if it allows quitting normally.

We made a little workaround that lets spellforce (1.54) be rendered at your native desktop resolution. Only Gui is then still stretched, but ingame renderings are fine.

-> https://www.moddb.com/games/spellforce-the-order-of-dawn/downloads/sf-high-resolution-mod

Much appreciated, I'll try it out!
My native desktop resoluton is 7680x1440 (48:9 aspect ratio) so this will be interesting. :D

EDIT:
Wow, that worked surprisingly well!
There were definitely issues with the HUD, but the ingame render were all working well, as advertised.

Question: is it possible to change the camera zoom / zoom levels?
The game view is set to match the X ratio (width), and the Y (height) is narrowed way in as a result.
Effectively zooming everything in way too much.

Will it allow launching the game in 1920x1440 on a natively 2560x1440 display? I don't really want to get the game into widescreen, but I wouldn't say no to a 4:3 resolution that corresponds to my screen, rather than 1600x1200.

Being able to minimize/maximize more fluently and being able to enter the options without the game freezing would be nice.

Say, have you tried playing in windowed mode, and changing the resolution to 1920x1440?

I never even considered trying a higher, but still 4:3 aspect ratio, resolution when I modded my config .ini file.

It will always apply your current windows desktop resolution. if you want less, simply lower your desktop resolution.
For SpellForce 2 there was this command: UI:SetCameraFOV(1.080)
No idea if that command also works for SF1.

Yes. It starts a miniature window in the top left of my screen with no way to maximize it. But the game quits without issues when windowed.

As for the ini edit, I tried changing the config.lua file but the game ignores it and stays on the 1600x1200. I also read that the game will crash whenever you enter options and are using an unsupported resolution. Which I do pretty often due to how buggy the shadows in the game are, often switching between very high/high depending on the amount of shadow flickering or disappearing.

EDIT:
Ah, turns out that the config file resolution affects the window size when using windowed. Managed to start in 1920x1440 but it's not borderless, sticks to the left of my screen and doesn't have black borders AND it also has the UI issues like the missing hero lifebar. So I'm just going to stick with the 1600x1200 fullscreen. I have only 5 free play maps to complete anyway before being done with the game. Not really worth it now.

Yes, a custom resolution is only possible in windowed mode. And I can confirm the game will crash when trying to open the options when using an unsupported resolution.

No idea why, but a custom resolution can sometimes fail if you don't change the "ScreenResolution" entry in the config.lua file as well to:
ScreenResolution = 4,

But you can click the window bar and drag it to wherever you want. It can be a bit tricky as the game only wants to minimize when deselected, but if you Alt+Tab out and have the mouse cursor outside the game window when Alt+Tab'ing back in, you can click the window bar and move it.

But do what works best for you. I tend to mod my games both for fun and on sheer principle if it doesn't do what I want it to. Like being displayed in a 2560x1440 window if that's the screen resolution I have. :)

UI issues is a worthwhile tradeoff for me. Annoying, to be sure, and the shadows are all over the place sometimes, but I'll take it for a bigger game window.

I play with 3x 27" 2560x1440 in Nvidia Surround (7680x1440) + a 4K TV above them, and if I don't play the games not supporting that resolution in windowed mode, every other screen just goes black / sleep mode. Which is personally much more annoying than an UI issue.

So, next year is now.

Any news on this? Or can patch 1.61 for GoG be considered vapour ware?

Sadly i got no new informations or feedback on this from official side :-( . If i got any, you would know by now.