There is currently a glaring issue with DirectDraw emulation in Windows 8/8.1. Old games which use DirectDraw or basically any DX version older than 9.0 run extremely slowly.

As far as I know Windows Vista & 7 both emulated DirectDraw however the speed is flawless on these OS's.

It's certainly not a driver or hardware issue, rather a bug in Windows 8 which has been left unfixed in 8.1.

There are many references to this issue on the Internet (Even on Microsoft Forums), I won't post links here as the post may be considered spammy (Though I will be happy to provide links if requested). I'm not sure that this bug is getting enough attention to the relevant people as real issues seem as if they are obscured by users complaining about the GUI.

Is there any place where this can be filed as an actual bug? It would be great for this to be sorted.

• Edited by Vince800 Wednesday, May 14, 2014 10:45 AM

Hi

Have you tried to insatll the old game in a compatibility mode and check the result. Actually Windows 8/8.1 compatibility mode is very strong and can make older paogram run more smoothly. And as we all know, there're many other factors we should pay attention to, such as the minimum system requirement for the game, memory, video card, CPU, drivers, resolution, related screen setting, or even metro, many things we can take into considerations.
Any way, many users found issues about DirectDraw or older DX, as a support person, I'm not able to go deeply for this issue, but I'll report this to our developer team later.
And hope this link can be helpful for you
https://connect.microsoft.com/

I have tried compatibility mode for the sake of troubleshooting but obviously this does not solve the issue. The games are fully compatible with Windows 8 anyway and have no problem launching, running and performing functions they're expected. It's purely the DirectX issue which is causing them to run very slowly.

My computer most definitely exceeds all of the requirements for these old games and I am able to play new titles (DirectX10+) flawlessly with good FPS.

It would be great if you could report this isssue, as stated above there are definitely many users who are experiencing this issue and it seems odd how compatibility was fine in both Vista & 7 but broken in Windows 8/8.1.

Would it be possible for someone from the dev team to post here to clarify this issue? It would be great for users experiencing this issue to get at least some confirmation of it and what is being done to resolve it.

I've looked on Microsoft Connect but I can't find an area on there to specifically report Windows 8 products, all of the products which are accepting feedback are of absolutely no relevance to this issue.

• Edited by Vince800 Thursday, May 15, 2014 6:51 AM

Hi

People in Dev tean will not post comments in this forum, but this is their discussion forum

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/home?forum=gametechnologiesgeneral&sort=relevancedesc&brandIgnore=True&searchTerm=DirectDraw+Emulation+

That forum seems to have been closed, it asks you to go onto the XNA forums which in turn then sends you to an Xbox forum! Completely irrelevant.

It would be great to get this through to the relevant area because this issue is also affecting certain DirectX9 games. There is definitely something in DirectX in Windows 8/8.1 which requires a fix, it's not compatibilty issues with the applications themselves as they run perfectly, there's just some stupid issue in DirectX which is holding them back from working at the correct speed.

It's annoying that there seems to be no clear cut way to report this issue. Even if some confirmation from Microsoft as to if this is going to be fixed or not would do, just so everyone knows where they stand with this issue, it seems odd that DirectX which promotes backwards compatibilty is not getting fixed as it should be.

Posted a thread on MSDN for those interested.

• Edited by Vince800 Monday, May 19, 2014 1:51 PM

For anyone following this, it's now over in Microsoft Answers:

DirectDraw Emulation Is Broken In Windows 8/8.1

• Edited by Vince800 18 hours 9 minutes ago