Sudden and Random HUGE FPS drops since last few patches
 

I've been having this really nasty problem since the last two patches (the beta, and now the official release and hotfix) where my FPS will be up in normal ranges (around 20-30 FPS) and then suddenly drop into the single digits, regardless of what direction I'm looking or whether I'm flying over ground. Before these recent patches I did NOT have this problem. It seems like just when things are working another patch comes around to screw everything up for me performance-wise.

It's almost like there's a memory leak. Anyone else having this issue? It makes the game completely unplayable for me. I could reinstall but I don't have a very fast internet connection and redownloading the game could take a very long time.

I'm running the game at full resolution (1920x1080) with texture settings set to Original, buildings on low, ground shading and detail at medium, trees at medium, with shadows and roads enabled, but no grass. SSAO, EP filter, vertical sync, and AA are of course turned off.

My relevant specs:

Windows 7 Ultimate
Intel i7 930 2.8 ghz (stock clock) quad-core
Geforce GTX 260 896 MB (overclocked to 675 ghz)
Rosewill 600W PSU
1 TB HD
6 GB ADATA DDR3 RAM

Atros posted this earlier;
"btw. Check that you do not have vsync ON in both game and drivers. It should be switched on only in one place. This mistake of mine killed performance for me as soon as they introduced fullscreen.

Triple buffering should be forced ON with a 3rd party utility if you use vsync or your fps would jump from 15 to 30 fps and back very often"

Vertical sync is turned off both in game and through Nvidia control panel.

Usually the first time I hop in game it works fine for the first 5 minutes or so, then will suddenly dip into the single digits for no reason. It then occasionally "pops" back into normal FPS, but eventually gets stuck in single digits until I restart the game. If I quit a mission and restart it, more often than not it will START in "low fps" mode right from the beginning.

Did you try enabling triple buffering anyway? Dont know if it will help but worth a shot.

S`

Aero?

Come again?

have you got Aero running?... it does that when Aero is struggling as the VGA is maxed out resources wise

Do you disable it by ticking off visual themes and desktop composition in the .exe?