[spydrct02]

If your antialiasing settings are on, try turning them off. I've never had any positive results when having that on for Graal. Vertical Sync will keep Graal from showing the "tearing" artifact, but at the expense of a bit more lag and less responsive controls. Graal being capped at 20 fps, I think it's worth the occasional tearing for less CPU usage.

Also, check if your RAM matches. That could be your bottleneck right there, no matter how much RAM you have. I've had a friend with unmatching 1 GB DDR RAM run slower than a single 128 SDR RAM. I do doubt that this problem causer, though.

Some LCD monitors perform noticably worse in higher refresh rates. If you have an LCD monitor, try putting it to the native resolution and refresh rate. Using NVidia's rotate feature sure doesn't help either.

Recently I've found out (at least for my machine) that using older NVidia drivers actually runs Graal a bit faster. When using 91.33 drivers, in full screen of 1600 x 1200, I would get a 3 second freeze while going between levels. When on 66.81, I get around a 1.5 second freeze on the same size. This isn't limited to just going between levels, as moving the "camera" far away (loading lots of tiles I guess) will give the exact same result. This all generally happens when the tileset changes or loads, so I guess it would be the tiles slowing everything down in this case? Seeing you have an NVidia card, do you have this problem too? Strange that I don't/didn't get this problem in Windows Vista and Linux with the latest drivers; I use XP Professional.