Games that lag on all PCs?

I know that there are some games that lag on all PCs, old and new, and changing the system specs doesn't improve the performance. There is this one

http://pc.ign.com/articles/701/701731p2.html

Here is an example, where a 2D game lags badly on all systems.

And I'm playing anno1701 right now, I found that changing the video card and CPU frequency, all else being the same, doesn't have a single frame of difference. So there is no point to overclock anything. And there is a guy with an i7 and 9GB of DDR3 triple channel ram, (I have E6600 and 2GB of dual channel), and he also experiences the same lag that I do.

Are there any one here that knows programming, and can explain what is exactly bottlenecking these games?

Thank you.

Try connecting your laptop to a CRT monitor ( old style) to see if the lag is caused by your laptop LCD.

Usually they are poorly optimised for the different configurations or don't take advantage of more than one core (CPU or GPU wise (mostly the old ones but not necessarily)) or there are the OS problems (that sometimes may be solved simply by running them in compatibility with an older OS) and then there may be other problems depending on what you are playing and on what are you playing.

One thing worth noting is that RTS games are often not coded quite as well as FPS games for various reasons:

A. The engine sometimes has more to data manage and thus is more complex inthat respect.

B. They usually sell less copies than FPS, thus lower budget.

C. They often have their own engine, whereas most FPS games use high-budget 2rd party engines (Unreal, Half Life...).

D. They often take longer to develop, making it harder to predict what spec PCs will be when released (for instance Supreme Commander targetted a too high spec when released).

E. Competition in the RTS engine realm is much lower than in the FPS engine realm.

This isn't always the case, depends on the game, editor and publisher but is more often than not the case.
Also it doesn't mean that all RTS games will have poor performance, just less refined than FPS.

Is Supcom's steep requirements due to that or just poor programming again? Do the developers have supercomputers when they were developing games and testing them on?

I see. So that may explain why really old games like Age of Empires II still lag on today's computers, just as it lags on pentium IIIs.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strateg [...] eview.html

This is another example, even Gamespot called a System Hog. The graphics looks very normal, yet it lags the fastest PCs at the time.

I'm beginning to wonder whether PC gaming is worth it compared to console, because PC hardware costs a lot more, and games run a lot more poorly. So are we just paying extra for the ineptitude of the developers?