Horrible frame rates =(

[Mokoto]

I have a AMD 7950 on stock clock and see about 20-30 fps in cities depending on amount of people. With few people I see 40's. I have a AMD Phenom II X4 3.4Ghz not OC'd. Your fps seems to be in line with your cards. You need to look at it in percentage. OCing your proc/GPU by 15% may only net you 3-4fps if you were at 30fps at stock clocks. The proc is important in this game, but GPU still does all the heavy lifting. I scored 10100 in the benchmark test. When crossfiring you wont see double the fps increase, you may see 70% increase over a single card. Your scores in the benchmark seem right in line with that.

I think most of the low fps in this game are poor optimization. It is a graphically demanding game, but I feel SE has done a poor job at optimization. Just changing drivers can change fps in this game 5-10fps, but the fps gains/drops fluctuate so badly, with little reason as to why. To stabilize my fps I set CCC to override AA, and set them to the lowest settings, I also set AF to override and chose AF16x and TFQ to performance. Changing those settings seem to stabilize my frame rate very well at "High (Desktop)" settings in game. Another in game setting that will get you a more stable frame rate is setting Shadow Resolution, and Cascading to their lowest settings. With lots of high pop areas this seems to make a large change in fps.

[Yoohoo]

i am running AMD Phenom II X6 1100T 3.3OGZ, stock speeds, i've not done anything to it, but it is the blackbox edition, so i can do w/e i need to =)

[Mokoto]

i am running AMD Phenom II X6 1100T 3.3OGZ, stock speeds, i've not done anything to it, but it is the blackbox edition, so i can do w/e i need to =)

I don't think there is anything you can do. This seems to be a issue with the game, or with drivers. I'm leaning more toward the game as even those with Nvidia's are having problems. Best bet is to just suck it up in cities. You should be seeing ~60 out in the world, and in dungeons. I normally keep the game set to limit frame rate to 60. No need to cook my card when the game isn't going to run over 60fps that often anyways unless you're in a inn. And besides worrying about your fps is kinda pointless. As long as you're at 30fps or better your experience isn't all that different from 60fps. Well at least IMHO. If you're knowledgable and want to OC then by all means. I have a black edition as well, and have OC'd a lot of my rigs. But unless you're water cooling getting a stable system OC'd by 20% is tough. And that only comes out to be maybe 6fps if you're at 30fps on stock clocks. To me the extra wear and tear on my system, plus the noise from the fans is just not worth it. Good luck with whatever you chose to do .

[Nakrah]

I scored 10100 in the benchmark test. When crossfiring you wont see double the fps increase, you may see 70% increase over a single card. Your scores in the benchmark seem right in line with that.

Correct. However, if I run my i7 @ stock speeds (2.66ghz) I will get about 6,500 with one card, and 6,800 with Crossfire. If you run MSI afterburner while playing each card will be @ ~55% utilization.

Once I Overclocked my CPU GPU utilization jumps to ~97% on each card and the crossfire score jumps to 10,200ish.

It seems bizarre to me that the game is CPU limited at stock clock speeds but drastically improved with an overclock.

I agree fully that this game is poorly optimized. Frame rate jumps from ~20FPS in stables to over 100FPS in small zones.

[Mokoto]

Correct. However, if I run my i7 @ stock speeds (2.66ghz) I will get about 6,500 with one card, and 6,800 with Crossfire. If you run MSI afterburner while playing each card will be @ ~55% utilization.

Once I Overclocked my CPU GPU utilization jumps to ~97% on each card and the crossfire score jumps to 10,200ish.

It seems bizarre to me that the game is CPU limited at stock clock speeds but drastically improved with an overclock.

I agree fully that this game is poorly optimized. Frame rate jumps from ~20FPS in stables to over 100FPS in small zones.

I think the easiest way to see why your proc is limiting you is to go to a inn. I see 130 fps in a in, and sub 20% proc utilization with ~98% GPU utilization. Go outside to a busy market or crystal, and proc is ~90% with frame rate seeming to be limited based on how many people are in view. So lots of people in view I see ~30fps, turn away I see ~45fps yet GPU utilization is much like yours ~55% and proc is ~90%. There seems to be a lot of processing going on for those people in view. I see so many threads on this subject, but so few people seem to see the direct link between proc speed/performance, and their fps in this game. To get solid 60fps in this game in a city, you will need a monster CPU with the current way it is running. What CPU that is, I dunno. I'm happy with my setup. As long as I see 30fps in the worst areas, I don't worry to much about my fps. And a dip to 20 wont bother me. It's when you hit ~15 fps that there is a problem even moving. What's annoying is based on SE's benchmark both of our system scored in the "Extremely High" range, and were rated at having no problems running this game. Sadly that is not the case when you go into a city. So I think a lot of people are a little sore in the rear cause they thought they had a powerful machine. But that power is no match for poorly written code! lol.