I have an old laptop, how do I turn off the animation?
After you have pressed ‘play’ and the splash screen has finished, select options and lower some of the graphics settings.
I would adjust everything down to the lowest settings and see how it plays for you. Then I would start to change things upwards until I was happy with the performance vs graphics balance. Shadows on low is defintely something that I would always set and leave alone on older PC’s. Also using Direct X 9.0 will probably help. The screenshot is my personal settings which run the game very well but I have a very modern gaming PC.