Old games work bad in Windows 8 / Bad performance for old games in Windows 8

Question

I have experienced performance drops in older games. I found out the games use DirectX 1,2,3,4,5,6 or 7 (DDRAW / DirectDraw technology).

How do I improve the performance for old games?

Answer 1

There is no way to improve the performance for old games which use DirectDraw. You can try switching the game / application to windowed mode, this worked for me on Dark Reign 2 which uses DirectX 7 (but it's really annoying to play in windowed mode).

For a game like Stranded 2 which uses also one of the older DirectX's (< 8) the only option ther is is to switch back to Windows 7.

This has nothing to do with graphics drivers as I noticed. Switching back to windows 7 fixes all issues with games which use DirectDraw. This concludes that Microsoft kind-of destroyed old DirectX support in Windows 8.