I thought I'd try this game out after my big upgrade a month or 2 ago. BIG MISTAKE. runs at 1-2fps and takes forever just to back out of the menu. WTF man? This game is from 2009 and I can run games like Wolfenstein: The new order/old blood and The evil within at 120fps.

This **** is Riddick-ulous!

My Specs:

Windows 7 Professional SP1 (x64)
ASUS z97-K Motherboard
Intel i7-4790k@ 4.0Ghz
Noctua NH-L12 CPU Air Cooler
32Gb Corsair Vengeance Pro 2400 DDR3 RAM
Gigabyte Geforce GTX970 gaming edition with Air cooler, 4Gb GDDR5 RAM
over 10Tb storage
Logitech F-710 Wireless controller
Logitech G710+ Gaming Keyboard
Logitech G502 Proteus Core customizeable Gaming mouse with 8 buttons
Logitech Extreme 3D Pro Flightstick
ASUS VG278 27" 3D Monitor 120Hz with Nvidia 3D vision 2 (3D Disabled for troubleshooting)
3D Vision 2 shutter glasses kit
700w PSU

I have tried XP Compatibility mode, run as admin and edited settings in Nvidia Control panel to disable MSAA, AF and even FXAA and limited frame rate to 60FPS via Nvidia Inspector as some games need that to run correctly on 120Hz displays. No Dice!

I can't believe it ran great on my old i5, GTX550 with 16Gb of slow ram and so bad after the upgrade. o.O

Same problem. Oddly, when I first got my new computer with an Intel i7 processor, 12GB RAM and an 840M Geforce gfx card, this was one of my first games I tried and it ran well back then.
I think Nvidia must have released some drivers later on that have messed up the game, because I too get the same problem, 1-2 fps in the main menu and I don't dare venture further into actual gameplay.
Also tried all those admin/compatibility mode and Nvidia control panel tweaks, no help.

Might be worthwhile trying to revert to some earlier driver, because this game did work before, around Christmas/New year when I originally got this computer and tried out a few different games to see how they ran an looked.

EDIT:
LOL, a minute later, as I was browsing the Steam forums of this game, I found out that by turning in Nvidia Control Panel the "Threaded Optimisation" option to OFF, fixes the framerate of the game! Argh, took me long enough.

Yeah I don't remember the main menu lagging this hard, this game is on a weird yet kinda amazing engine, weird performance quirks like this that go away with something simple, and the game runs near-flawlessly and looks amazing. A part of me thinks this game looks almost better than some of the games you'd see today, the lighting and shading has depth and it's all done tastefully.

SOLUTION: as @Nathan89 said. Disable multithreading for this game completely.

For me, it was to disable "Threaded optimization" for this game in the Nvidia Control Panel. This game's engine can't handle multithreading at all and needs to run on one thread only or it runs in slow motion.

Hello everyone,

Sorry for the up but I tried (almost) everything and the game still stutters :-/
I deactivated the multi-threading in the game options and in the nVidia control panel, switched to another resolution to get the maximum refresh rate (at 1920x1080 it's locked at 23hz) and nothing worked.

So if anyone has a solution...

Same problem here,played this game a few months back and it ean fine, but now it lags with no audio

I've experienced same problem with lagging. Then tried to search some answers at this forum. But at the same time I installed up to date Nvidia drivers. With new drivers game running smoothly. I run it at 4k resolution.I tried to change multithreading option but it gives no difference. The only problem is that if you try to turn on antialiasing it start lagging badly. Not sure if it's hardware (I have gtx970 card and run it at 4k) or software problem. But at least it runs great without antialiasing.

Works fine here Ryzen 7 + GTX 980ti + Win 10. Only thing that is wonky for me is Reshade.

Update: So I had a old install of the game which works fine. However I installed the game through galaxy with the newest files and the performance drop is considerable. Seem to primarily be a issue with the new version of the GOG exe, When I swapped out the exe from the older install to the newer one boom worked well again.
Additional Update: I would also recommend trying to disable V-sync if you have it running.

It's been a while but I think I found something : deactivate the anti-aliasing and activate the Screen Space Ambient Occlusion.

I still don't know why the refresh rate always comes back to 23hz each time you start the game but anyway, whether it's 23 or 60, the game runs without any stutter.