Draken: Order of the Flame

It's not the install that was the issue. The game would not start in XP. I could get to the main menu, but it quit out when I clicked new game, regardless of compatibility settings. You wouldn't believe how many old games I play in XP which people say don't work. Thus I know when a game doesn't start.
As it happens, I could have got round it....
Long story short, the developer mode needed for displaying the FPS causes these issues with XP. Somthing I only discovered at a later date, but I digress.....

I think it's the view range. I used a fog disabling hack to increase it significantly. Dunno what specificaly is killing it though as my GF3 ran it relatively happily.
/me waits for ChrisRay to suggest a reason.

That's odd. I was playing it at pretty much max detail on my GF3 (No AA/AF at 800x600 as was my norm at the time), and the configuration allows you to scale back hte settings quite drasticly. Without the foghack on, I get a good 90FPS in 1280x1024/4x4x

Here are some more shots. Just to emphasise how big the levels in this game are, all the shots so far and these are taken from one level. One level which takes 3 seconds to load on my PC. These shots are with the Fog-hack off in 1024x768x32/4x4x. The FPS was jumping from 64 to 128 to 256. No in-between... I figure the FPS calc can't handle my machine . The 42 FPS shot was due to the way I take shots: I had just alt-tabbed in and pressed printscr immidiately so my machine hadn't quite recovered from the switch.

I figure the reason it was running so crap was the fog hack did exactly what it said it did: made the card render the entire level, removing the clipping pane. Given, as Demigod said, the scale of the levels, that's a lot of work.
I say this as I'm still getting good framerates in 1600x1200. Pretty much identical to my 1024x768 ones actualy, until I use the foghack

>I believe it was designed to run on a Matrox G400, which featured hardware bump-mapping.

That is indeed correct. Drakan was one of the first games to use Enviormental bump mapping (as opposed to Dot3). I'll demonstrate with my next batch of shots when I get round to playing the next level.