Why is C&C Generals so SLOW?

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I have played C&C Generals Zero Hour on 2 different PC's now and once a skirmish game runs for 5 minutes (at most) with 6 to 8 players (1 person, rest are CPU) the game slows to unplayable levels and I end up just quitting.
It seems to be a well discussed problem everywhere but no definite resolution. My PC spec is in my sig, obviously more than capable of running generals at full gfx settings.
I heard that it doesn't like anti-aliasing, tried turning that off (in-game and ATi CCC) - no different. What else can I try?

 

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Its badly programmed. The AI code (imo relating to unit path finding specifically though some dispute this) is terribly inefficient. I dont know of any way to get a decent experiance with that many AI players.

The thing is, I recall approx. 2 years ago when I got pretty good performance with 6 - 7 AI players and on a machine of a lot lower spec than what I have now. I have been reading (again!) and others say it doesn't like overclocked machines, but what the france would that have to do with it if my machine is 100% stable at its overclocked speed?
Regarding programming - that is indeed true to a great extent, and even worse for some of the downloadable maps. There are some excellent ones out there available for download, but are much, much, much slower than the default maps once the AI gets busy, from my experience anyway.

 

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Firstly, I can only agree with everyone saying about how badly programmed it is. Also, it is the biggest bugger of a game to set up on a LAN, even if it's just 1 on 1; doesn't matter if both players have the same version and no mods installed - nope, still won't work.

My guess is your CPU is too weak. When running with that many AI players it probably (rightly or wrongly) gets quite demanding once a lot of units have been builts. Yes, I know that in theory an A64 at 2.4ghz should be able to handle games from a couple of years ago, but it may not be that way. Might be worth clocking your cpu speed right down and see if that makes things even worse? If so you've found the problem

That said I wonder what you class as "full gfx settings"? As you only have an X850XT, playing at very high resolution (say above 1600x1200) with AF enabled could potentially cause a little slowdown.

I haven't updated my sig in a while The AMD64 3200+ is gone. I actually now have an Athlon X2 3800+ running a shade under 2.4GHz. I'm thinking that might be even worse for Generals because I can't imagine it being programmed to use both cores
You may be right about the X850XT, although I owned a 9800pro for a good 12-18 months which is what Generals was mostly played on. Had it at 1280x1024 with 2x AA. The X850XT should be capable of running 1600x1200 at 2xAA, 2xAF, but I will try lowering the settings anyhow (I play BF2 at 1600x1200, 2xAA, 2xAF, never once had a stutter).

 

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Well...

Generals and Zero Hour work perfetly for me with everything on high and at max resolution..... and I have a 64mb GPU, 1.6Ghz Centrino laptop and 512mb ram.....

Odd.

I knew somebody would show up It worked for me before on a lower-spec system so there has to be some setting somewhere.
Do you have anti-aliasing set in Generals or in Windows, or anisotropic filtering? And do you mean that you have every checkbox ticked in the options, e.g. water, 2d + 3d shadows etc?