Aliens vs. Predator: AvP Bugfix and Configuration Guide

AvP (2010) comes in two flavors: DirectX 9 and DirectX 11. DX11 runs smoothly out of the box, and comes with neat features like smooth shadows, tesselation, and anti-aliasing (seriously?!) But even in 2010, everyone noticed that the smooth shadows look almost identical and the tesselation is almost impossible to spot because it applies to two models in the entire game. The only thing you’d miss is the anti-aliasing, which was already an industry standard even in the heyday of DX9, so I’m not sure why that feature was made exclusive to DX11.

Anyway, the DX11 version runs smoothly, but it has some serious visual glitches that take you out of the experience once you start noticing them. Predator visual overlays and the marine flashlight don’t work properly, for starters. DX9 doesn’t have the glitches, but it also doesn’t have AA–but that can be forced from your graphics control panel as a persistent setting. So the only reason to be playing the DX11 version is that it doesn’t struggle to run on modern versions of Windows, which broke DX9 support some time ago.

So the purpose of this section is to make DX9 run smoothly and force AA through the GPU control panel, so it feels just like playing DX11, but without the glitches. It should be noted that both versions default to 60 fps, and while alt-tabbing out and back uncaps the framerate, this can introduce bugs and crashes if you don’t follow these directions.

You need to be running the right version of AvP for any of this to work. The AvP Launcher app automatically defaults to the DX11 version if it’s available and can run on your PC–and in 2024, that’s every PC. You don’t want this. Instead:

• You should probably navigate to the game folder and rename it so you don’t accidentally run it.
• While you’re there, create a shortcut from AvP.exe and move it to your desktop.
• Delete Steam’s default shortcut.
• From your library, right click the game, select Properties, and under the General Tab, Select Launch Options and Launch Aliens vs Predator – DirectX 9.

Now you’re not going to run anything but the DX9 version without navigating to the game folder.

So this is going to unalive two birds with one stone. It uncaps the framerate, improves performance, and prevents crashes tied to alt-tabbing. We’re going to download the latest version of DXVK, and extract the 32-bit versions of three .dlls into the game’s main folder: dx8.dll, dx9.dll, and dxgi.dll. That last one’s optional, and including it will break the DX11 version, but you can try it if you’re still not getting great performance.

If you’ve done this correctly, you can now force any framerate you like from the GPU control panel. Ditto anti-aliasing. Auto HDR should be working correctly, if you have an HDR monitor. Performance should be leaps and bounds better. And it will fix the alt-tabbing weirdness, which will come in handy for the next step.

Someone at Rebellion coded the game to start at a low CPU priority, and revert to a low CPU priority every time you alt-tab the game back into focus. This is a problem, because you can’t raise the priority without tabbing out, and you can’t play the game without tabbing back. Pernicious. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is intentional, because when I did force the game to run persistently at a high priority, I got mini-crashes instead. Too many xenomorphs trying to attack at once, and the game would automatically tab out and back. It’s quick, so at first you’ll think it’s just pausing every time the action ramps up.

Leaving the priority at “low” seems to prevent, or at least mitigate, this. But it also leads to frame drops and massive input lag. I spent years thinking the lag was a deliberate design decision because it’s consistent and gives movement a sense of heft–but it’s really just the game struggling to keep up! Fixing this is the other thing you need to do to make the DX9 version of the game indistinguishable from the DX11 version.

Anyway, download Process Lasso and run it while you’re running the DX9 version of the game. You’re going to want to do this after you’ve installed DXVK so your changes stick and you don’t have to run PL every time you run the game. Trust me, that will get old real fast.

In Process Lasso, right click AvP.exe. Select CPU Priority>Always>High (NOT Real Time!) Repeat the process to enforce by registry. Feel free to do the same thing with memory and input priority, can’t hurt.

If you’ve done this correctly, the game should be running that much smoother. Or crashing to the pause menu on The Pyramid, if you skipped ahead instead of installing DXVK.

None of what I’ve said so far is going to help if you can’t get the game to run. In the last few weeks, it seems like everyone’s been hit with a glitch that sees Steam stuck “Updating Executable” instead of launching the game. Somehow or other, Steam’s DRM got broken. Instead of cheating the publisher by letting us play this fourteen-year-old abandonware for free, Steam is functionally cheating the people who legitimately purchased this game. I’m not saying anybody had bad intentions, but this is one of the reasons I still don’t care for DRM after all these years. It’s okay for us to get cheated, just not them. It’s not an equitable transaction, belying the libertarian myth of… well, libertarianism.

Anyway, there are two solutions that I know of:

• The simplest is to wait. Don’t even try to start the game for a few days to a week. I have no idea why this works. I guess I’d have to know how the DRM works to know why it breaks, and gets better just as suddenly.
• I’ve heard, but not tested, that launching the game from Big Picture Mode fixes it. No promises.

One thing I will wholeheartedly recommend AGAINST is to come across a set of AvP executables (DX9, DX11, and Launcher) that run without a DRM check… somehow. This is me explicitly telling you not to do anything illegal. But also, just for informational purposes, if you were to mod or otherwise come across a version of the program that runs without the DRM check, it would probably run with the rest of the files you downloaded from Steam. So, you know, not really piracy, since you still had to buy the game to play it. Too bad it’s illegal. Also, it might potentially restore LAN play, which means multiplayer without server dependency, since LAN spoofing isn’t service-specific. This would make the game future-proof and platform-agnostic… these are the reasons I hate DRM, not because I want to get things without paying for them. Rather, I just want to use what I’ve already paid for.

But again, the legal penalties for piracy are quite severe, and no game is worth going to prison over, even if you did already pay for it. Please just wait for Steam to fix it on their end.

You can leave the launcher and original shortcut intact if you take a second copy of AvP.exe and rename the first to AvP_DX11.exe. Just make sure it has its own settings in your graphics control panel and Process Lasso. Now you can’t fail to launch the DX9 version.

If you bought AvP from another source, you can use this hack to run the launcher (and thus, the Steam version) from the Steam library, and then select the DX9 version/use a new shortcut when you want to launch the non-Steam version. Why would you want to do this? Well, I don’t know if the retail version still has LAN play, but if it does, this would be a convenient way to access it from your Steam Library. Maybe someone could go on Amazon and check on this for me?