bottleneck performance?

[Sensual]

Don't forget the game is runing on directx9 so older cards WILL perform better as newer cards can obviously run it but they aren't "Prepared" . Once it switches do 11 you'll see a major improvement.

[einzele]

Two important factors that no one seem to have mentioned, did you recently check your pc for virus? and are you running an anti-virus while playing the game?
Both the anti-virus and a virus can be processor heavy, so get rid of virus and then get rid or configure your anti-virus for gaming mode.

i have installed kaspersky right after reformat. it does regular checkup and update, i hope its not infected with virus

@einzele

Yeah it is just so weird you are getting only 20 FPS.

My CPU is the same generation and 400Mhz isnt going to make a 90% FPS difference.
The 970 actually benches higher than the R9 290 in DX9 as well.

I wonder if you could compare yours to another with a 970 in Mor Dhona on standard desktop. That might get you a baseline for Max and Standard settings to try and pinpoint the bottleneck.

Also - when you install new NVidia drivers, do you got to custom -> Clean Installation?

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Edited: I wonder if it has something to do with NVidia's PhysX on the 900 Series Cards.
Try going into the NVidia Control Panel -> Set PhysX Configuration

It's probably on Auto, so try it with either the CPU or GPU while playing and see if it makes a difference.

well 20 is the bottom line and its not like it always stays there. the spot where animus quest npc, camera looking at the market is where i found to have lowest fps, others spots can give me 30-40 or more. i use ultrawide monitor and has more horizontal pixel, but even though i change the resolution to 1920x1080 the fps gain is minimal, 3 to 5 fps at most.
my heavensward bench score is 10800
yes i did clean installation and change the physx config between auto cpu or gpu, none had any noticeable difference.

400 MHz can be quite impactful depending on how it scales with other components. The original benchmark performance scaled almost in direct ratio on my older C2D system. 4100-4700 at 3ghz up to 6200-6700 when pushed to around 4ghz depending on various configurations when pushing things to the edge of stability to see if I could raise quality and stay 30fps or better.
I also found that past certain thresholds (about 3.6ghz on the CPU and about 10% over stock on GPU core) I started getting more bang for the buck by ramping up memory clocks--both at the system level and graphics card levels. You can reach a point where it is less of a raw horsepower problem and more of a data transfer issue.

yes i notice the screenshots posted here have faster cpu than mine, i really think thats the culprit.

[einzele]

i forgot to show the real in game capture here