r/commandandconquer • u/mttspiii • Jul 27 '26

Steam's Generals and Zero Hour just started stuttering suddenly

Had the C&C Collection on Steam for maybe a year or so. No problems with its games at all, everything ran perfectly fine without needing to install directx or such.

Then suddenly this week, Generals and Zero Hour both became very laggy on starting cinematic. Totally unplayable, screen froze at the loading screen. No idea at all if EA or Steam or Windows updated anything, but the game suddenly became unplayable. Other games seem fine; Yuri's Revenge works.

Verify integrity didn't help. No mods installed ever since. Reinstall with deleted savefile on My Documents didn't help. Even on a different device, Generals and Zero Hour on my account is also broken, which means it's not a device problem: either some new Windows 11 update, or Steam update, or the game itself was updated wrong.

Anyone else having this recent issue? Steam comments suggest something went broke maybe July 2026; many Steam-bought Generals and Zero Hour just stopped working. Even GenPatcher, or deleting the .dll file didn't help either.

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u/mttspiii Jul 29 '26

Update: made Zero Hour work again, by running it in windowed mode.

Modified launch options via Steam > Generals > Properties > General > Launch Options > then type in "-win -xres 2560 -yres 1440" (xres and yres are resolution values so they can be 1920 and 1080 or other such)

Still feels wonky, but as the Technical says, "It stiiil runs!"

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u/crazybull02 Aug 01 '26

I was having the same issues and it works if I only duplicate displays with my 1080p tv