Luckily I’ve been free of most issues concerning activating and playing the game but there is one issue that has really bugged me and, although I have now finished my first playthrough, it’s an issue that did seem to slightly effect my enjoyment of what is otherwise a phenomal piece of gaming.

The issue is that, no matter what I do, my framerate in the game will not go above 20-30 unless I’m in a dungeon or otherwise mostly vacant area, in which case it averages around 35-40. I’ve tried all the fixes that I’ve been able to find, like installing the new nvidia drivers and uninstalling the nvidia 3D vision stuff.

The main thing I don’t understand is that the framerate is the same whether I run the game on high or the lowest settings possible (ie. everything at minimum/off), which simply strikes me as incredibly odd. It means that with everything on the lowest settings the game runs at around 20-30 fps, and if I put the settings up to high, it still only runs at 20-30 fps. It’s like the games performance is somehow being capped on this machine, like something isn’t allowing it to run any better than that. Also, because of this, the many fixes I’ve seen that mention disabling things like SSAO or AA to improve performance aren’t applicable in my case.

Another thing I can’t understand is that my other PC, a 4 and a half year old computer that I use mainly for casual gaming (2.2GHz Core 2 Duo E6600, 2GB RAM, 512MB 9600GT GPU) , is able to run the game on lowest settings with the same performance as this computer, a 2 year old gaming PC which had it’s GPU replaced only a month ago (Core 2 Quad Q8200, 3GB RAM, 1GB GTX 560 Ti Super Overclocked).

Could anyone please advise me as to what may be the problem, and how I may be able to fix this performance problem which is making the game only just playable on any graphical setting.

When you say you uninstalled the 3D-vision stuff, do you mean you checked it off at the installer or you uninstalled it manually later?

This is probably dumb to ask but you most likely have disabled ubersampling yes? Also try running the game as an admin although that is really a long shot.

I'm also sporting a GTX560Ti but I'm getting 40-60fps on ultra just fine. Your issue might be related to the other hardware you have.

My initial guess is your chokepoint is your cpu. What is that? 2.3 GHz? And, while it's technically an upgrade over your 2.2 dual core, it's probably not much of one in terms of running a video game. But, that's just my guess.

CPU is the bottleneck.

Do you have the beta drivers, or just the latest certified release?

Clean the dust from your CPU with a blower. It works for me because my GPU was being forced too much because of the heat!

@ Oscopter: I did both, uninstalled the 3D vision stuff and when it made no difference I uninstalled the drivers completely and reinstalled without the 3D crap.

Like I also said, I've tried the game on both high and the lowest settings possible, so yes, ubersampling has been off.

@ Chautemoc: When I first played the game I was using the certified released drivers but later installed the betas due to many people claiming they fix the performance issues.


I get what everyone is saying about my CPU bottlenecking my performance but what I don't get is that there is no improvement, no matter which settings I choose. Surely changing settings between high and low would not only affect GPU performance but also that of my CPU aswell, but even on low I get the same framerate as I do with high settings.

When I was choosing my GPU I had alot of people saying that my CPU, although not being the perfect fit, wouldn't bottleneck it all that much since the Q8200 is one of the last generation of the Core 2 Quad processors. Whether that's true or not I don't know, but it makes sense.

Bump?

Try to enable dangeling objects limiter, it is near the button in the configuration and it takes load off your CPU.

I'm in the same boat - a bit weaker system (dual core phenom, gts 450, no 3d vision, sync off) and roughly the same FPS at all graphics settings. Turning on or off dangling objects limiter doesn't seem to make any difference either.
Luckily I don't mind playing at 20-28 fps :)

Turn off motion blur, solved all my fps problems

It could very well be vertical sync if your fps stays stuck at 30 max no matter what... disable it and see if it helps (though you may suffer some screen tearing, depending on your monitor).

vsync is off. I'm pretty sure of that because i can't win arm wrestling with it on.

I only have a q9550 with 8gb ram and like i said had no FPS issues once i turned off motion blur (which i cant stand anyway) also as i mentioned in another thread i use

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=112556

on all my game .exe files