Awful lag in certain areas

Normally the game runs flawlessly for me. But when I enter certain areas it drops down to just a few frames per second. I'm running an almost identical PC to a friend of mine and he doesn't get any lag at all.

The game ran fine in phase 3, but at some point during phase 4 it started this lag business.

Here is my system:

• Win 7 - 64bit
• Intel i7-2600 CPU @ 3.4GHz
• nVidia GTX 580 (4gb ram)
• 16 gigs DDR3 (1800) RAM
• 2 SSD hard drives in a raid 0
• (High speed cable internet (35 up, 6 down))

Thinking this wasn't a hardware issue, I formatted the computer during beta phase 4 and downloaded the game from scratch. That didn't help.

What other information do I need to post to get assistance with this issue or what suggestions do you have based on what I've already said? Any help is appreciated. Thank you.


Additional info:
Mostly I'm lagging when entering a camp. Seems to happen when there are a lot of players. Though I don't necessary lag at a fate that has just as many players.

Update:
I installed the beta nVidia driver 3.26 which came out August 20th, 2013. This is the driver my buddy (who has no lag) is using. The game is down for maintenance right now but I'll try this out and post my results.

Update:
New video drivers did not help. I still lag in the city, even when there aren't tons of people on screen. In beta phase 3 I had no issues. They only started appear in phase 4 and beyond.

Perhaps there is a specific graphical setting that could cause my system this laggy trouble? Any one have any suggestions?

What do I need to do to get technical assistance with this issue? It's getting worse and worse. I can barely even walk through camp Dragonhead.

I asked for assistance in-game and they just referred me to this board. It's been 3 days, I guess that's not such a long time to go without help. But does anybody know what kind of assistance I'm to expect here? Am I actually waiting for an SE employee to give me an idea or is this just a forum for us players to communicate on?

Game probably is not optimized for nVidia cards, so I heard in other threads.
I have the same issue, randomly losing a bunch of FPS in random areas regardless of players number/activity. Just me and a whole bunch of nothing and I still lose about 20~25 FPS, even in cutscenes there's a small lag.
Some of it is not even counted by the in-game FPS counter.

Thanks for the reply! I was starting to think I was alone, in a desert of despair ;)

I referenced a friend in my OP who has the same system as me (a bit less powerful) and a 570 GTX nVid card and he has no lag at all. He's using the same driver as me and it's even a slightly slower video card. So I'm not sure it's a nVid thing or if it's a particular setting or something else entirely.

It's been 5 days since my OP, any chance we could get a technical response with some ideas to try and resolve the issue?

Since my last post I've also tested to make sure it's not connection based. Took my router out of the picture, made sure my internet was good and fast (35 down, 6 up). Of course that didn't help.

You're not alone. A lot of people have this issue, on both nvidia and AMD cards. It's SE's terrible optimization, or lack there of. I keep crashing, and my fps drops to 15-20 in cities vs 60-70 in instances.

Yup, you aren't alone with your problem. I expect a performance hit in Cities so that's not the problem. The problem is the game wants your GPU to render everything regardless of it being on screen so your FPS is up and down like crazy. The game works perfect in dungeons, I'm running around 150 fps in dungeons. Outside however it can range from 90 right down to 35 just by looking around with next to nothing on screen.

I know the benchmark isn't the best platform to base actual game performance but the lowest it ever went on there was 80 with an average of 103 on max @ 1080p. So I would likely a guess that the game just isn't optimized properly.

Well at least I know I'm not alone. Though it's still a bit disheartening. I guess the issue is on SE's end then? So we're waiting for patches to improve performance?

If I went out and bought one of those fancy new video cards, that wouldn't help?