Overview
AOE III was released in 2005; while the game was mildly demanding for graphics cards of that age (see what I did here), it runs anywhere from 100 to 700 (!) frames per second on today’s cards, causing unnecessarily high amount of heat. This guides shows a simple way to resolve this first world problem.
Turn on VSYNC
By setting VSYNC in NVIDIA Control Panel (for this game specifically) to ON, the game runs at a butter smooth 60 fps (tested with FRAPS); this renders the game beautifully, while keeping your modern graphics card cool.