Need to pinpoint what's causing slow-down on Borderlands 2.....

Uzeless

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Sep 4, 2011
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Hi all,

Wondered if any experts could help me with a small problem.
Like a lot of people, I'm currently playing (and loving) Borderlands 2 on my rig alongside Fraps to monitor the frame-rate. The game settings are set to unlimited frame-rate with V-sync off. The game normally sits comfortably at 60fps but if I get set on fire (which happens a lot ;) ) then the frame-rate drops into single figures.
My rig is basically an AMD Phenom II 965 BE CPU, 8GB of RAM and an Nvidia GTX580 graphics card running at max settings on everything at 1080p. I haven't overclocked anything on my system yet.
Can anyone advise what would be the bottleneck in my system for this issue and what would be best to resolve it?
 

MotherFerJones

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Sep 2, 2012
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try turning the AA off or lower it to 2x, Nvidias have a smidgen of trouble with AA especially heavy 8x AA. I'm not that informed about AMD CPU's so it could be a bottleneck but i have no clue as to the performance of that CPU so .... take it with a grain of salt.
 

Uzeless

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Thanks people.
Just for the record, the CPU is an AM3 socket quad core 3.4GHz jobbie.
Updated my graphics card drivers last week, but I'll see if any new ones have come out and try that. I'll also try out the Afterburner software.....downloading now.
 

IIIRaMBaMIII

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Aug 17, 2011
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Ya i also agree that it is not your graphics card. I have the game maxed out on my 480 which is a little worse then your card, and i get rock solid frames @ 60. Not to mention my GPU usage is around 50-60%. You should not be seeing single digits. What driver you running?
 

Uzeless

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I am running driver version 9.18.13.623.
Funny thing, I had to get that info from the Windows 7 control panel as when I try to retrieve the 'System Information' in the Nvidia Control Panel, it crashes....every time. Is this a know issue with the Nvidia software?
 

Slayer366

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I have the Nvidia Quadro FX1600M graphics card and I was having issues with BL2 running slow. At times it was fine, but then it would hit less than 18 fps. My card also has physx capability, but I took a wild guess at it and discovered that Nvidia PhysX takes quite the toll on the video card and especially if the game itself isn't well optimized for it either. I went into my Nvidia control panel and forced PhysX onto my CPU rather than my graphics card and the game runs wonderfully now. I'm also only running the game on a semi-decent dual-core processor so your Quad-AMD should not be bottlenecking you. Try turning off your PhysX for your GPU and set it to CPU only and see if that doesn't help. It sure worked wonders for me so I'm wondering....