It feels wrong that a 2008 game stutters on a modern GPU, but it happens: modern drivers often treat an old OpenGL game as a low-priority background task and run it on integrated graphics, or throttle it into a low-power state.
Fixes in order
- In Windows Graphics Settings, browse to
FretsOnFire.exeand set its graphics preference to High Performance, so it runs on your discrete GPU. - Update your GPU driver from the GPU maker’s site.
- Close overlays and recording tools for one test run.
- Lower the game’s resolution and turn off any theme or background video (in FoFiX, disable MPEG video backgrounds) to isolate whether rendering or audio is the bottleneck.
If FPS is still bad
Test FoFiX, which handles modern hardware better, and check the OpenGL guide if the game also fails to initialise graphics. A low frame rate that only appears on one song usually points at that song’s background or chart, not at your GPU.
Browse the full hub. Related guides: frets on fire opengl error, frets on fire black screen crash, fofix install themes.