So I bought Jade Empire, a classic game that I used to play way back on my original Xbox console, for the PC, expecting it to perform great out of the box, seeing as it's a rather old title.
Much to my dissapointment, this wasn't the case, as I was greeted with disgustingly choppy performance my first time booting up the game.

This is a common problem, and I have a strong feeling everyone who bought this game is experiencing it. But don't despair, there's a very simple fix ahead!

The fix itself is actually very simple and straightforward.
All you have to do is navigate to your Jade Empire folder (the default being something like "C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\Jade Empire\") and look for a file named JadeEmpire.ini.

Open/edit the file with Notepad (or alternative of your choice) and look for the following line:

ClampFPS=1

What this line in the config file does is limits your framerate in the game to 30FPS, which is a big no-no for a modern PC gamer.
All you have to do is change that line to

ClampFPS=0

In addition you should also check that the line RefreshRate has the appropriate value for your monitor (this should be setup properly by default, but doesn't hurt to double check).

If that doesn't improve things for you, look for D3DAdapter, which is set to 0 and set it to 1. So the line should look like this:

D3DAdapter=1

That's it! You're all done. Save the file and close it.

Want to improve the performance and visuals even more? Here's some more tweaks I personally use and highly recommend.

Go into your graphics card control panel and force VSync on the game executable (JadeEmpire.exe). This should make sure that you won't experience any screen tearing.

If you want to get rid of the game's inherent jaggies, I'd also recommend you force some Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering (personally set AA to 4x and AF to 16x, which make the game look incredibly smooth).

Also, if you're on Windows Vista/7/8 and haven't already done this, I strongly recommend running JadeEmpire.exe in compatibility mode for Windows XP SP2/3 and as an Administrator. This should help eliminate any remaining performance issues.

Apparently some people are having issues where the game would be running at a solid framerate but still wouldn't actually play smoothly.
Fortunately somebody from the GOG forums posted a fix.

Download:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180604111220/https://bitbucket.org/fk/jade-empire-stutter-fix/downloads/ (archive of the original link)

http://www. mediafire .com/file/lzampxsmpevthnu/file (reupload, remove spaces)

Installation:
- Extract the contents of this archive (in particular `d3d9.dll`) into your
Jade Empire installation directory, next to `JadeEmpire.exe`.
- Run the included `vcredist_x86.exe` installer to install the *Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 x86 Redistributable*. You may already have it
installed in which case the installer will do nothing.

Source:
Can be found at https://bitbucket.org/fk/jade-empire-stutter-fix. Builds with VS2015.

Original post:
https://www.gog.com/forum/jade_empire_special_edition/stuttering_fix

That's it!
You should now have a perfectly functional and (for it's age) beautiful looking game!

I hope people find this guide helpful and enjoy Jade Empire as it was meant to be enjoyed on PCs!

• 5. 9. 2020 - updated broken links. (thanks to SpareGoblin for the archive!)