[Dev] Overtaxation of PC Hardware

[Kazahashi]

Maybe someone here can help me, considering people are talking about how taxing the game is....

When the game first launched, I bought the CE, and had the game maxed in everything except for Ambient Occlusion and Depth of Field....and then I turned Depth of Field on and it still ran just fine....I quit in November to give the game time to get fixed and went and played WoW with my Dad (long story, but in short, it helped me find him again after not talking for a long time....and it was the only way I knew I could get in contact with him)....anyways, so I came back last week, I reformatted my hard-drive, did a clean Win7 install, which is what I was running before....updated the game AND all my drivers fully and got all the up to date stuff....and the game runs WAY worse then it did before....to the point that I can only run it acceptably on Standard now across the board....

It's weird as hell, and has me terribly confused because I had bought this computer (built it myself, not pre-built) specifically FOR this game.....did something happen with the patches that I'm not aware of, or should I roll back my ATI drivers for the older ones? I know my way around computers....a lot, but this has me incredibly confused, and slightly more than irritated. Thanks in advance for the replies and/or tips.

I posted this in the Tech Support forums too, but you all seem fairly active in this thread, so I figured I'd give it a shot here as well.

[Sinzfeldt]

Game performance shouldn't have degraded THAT much, you can try a different driver but it shouldn't make too much difference. What is your setup?

[Kazahashi]

AMD Phenom II x4 965 (with an Arctic Cooler 7 Pro)
6 GB DDR3
ATI RADEON 5850
1 TB WD 7200 RPM HDD

That's really all that matters when it comes to the game....it's really freakin' weird though, and makes me think I should try wiping the computer again....I dunno.

[Sinzfeldt]

Try dropping the resolution a notch and making sure General/Background drawing aren't on max. If that doesn't work drop it some more and if that doesn't work you have a problem