Titan Quest Immortal Throne stuttering problem fixed

[Darth Wong]

Just a note for any of you who have Titan Quest: Immortal Throne or who have patched Titan Quest to version 1.30. There is a well-known stuttering problem that was introduced with the expansion pack, as well as the simultaneously released patch for the original game. On more powerful machines, such as Matthew's dual-core AMD64 machine, it's not too noticeable, but on my creaky old 3GHz Pentium-4, it makes the game almost unplayable.

It turns out that this problem is related to the Miles Sound System libraries that Titan Quest uses. It seems that they used a buggy version, and for some reason, the developers have either failed to identify this problem or can't be bothered to fix it. You wouldn't think that severe framerate problems would result from a buggy sound library, but they do. However, if you copy the "miles" directory from an installed copy of Medieval 2: Total War on top of the "MilesRedist" directory in the THQ/Titan Quest directory (and the Immortal Throne directory too, if you have the expansion pack), this instantly fixes the problem. I tried playing it for an hour and didn't see a single stutter, even on my old P4. I even turned the graphic details back up.

Of course, if you don't have a copy of Medieval 2: Total War, this won't help you and you clearly don't have good taste in games.