This should go into a hardware thread but it only happens in AOC. My brother is running a 8800GTX of the EVGA flavor, 4 gigs of GSKILL DDR2 800, an ASUS M2N SLI-Deluxe, and a phenom 9600. my question is why can he not get over 20 fps? It fluctuates between 5-20 fps on the outside enviroments but, the wierd thing is it runs flawless in the city enviroments kickin anywhere from 30-75 fps. Anyone have any ideas? Below is a list of things that we have tried.

Lowering settings. This actually makes it worse.
Turning DX10 off. This makes it worse.
Changeing resolution. This makes it worse.
overclocking the gpu and cpu. No Change.
Updated every driver and flashed teh bios to the newest. No change.

Any and all suggestions would be appreciated.

Is it only in AoC? What's his performance like in other games (Bioshock, Crysis, Company of Heroes, etc.)?

I assume you're running Vista since you had DX10 enabled, but are you running 32 bit or 64 bit?

Also, what resolution?

ok performance in all the other games are excellent, he is running 64bit vista, and his res is 1280 X 1024. Before i came to work i tinkered with the cpu a lil more and was able to squeaze 25 to 34 frames out of it. It is making me think that for some reason the cpu is bottlenecking the system.

any other suggestions? to get the 25 to 34 i used the software in the ASUS bios to OC it 10%.

First of all don't worry about DX10, I found out yesterday that the setting for it does nothing (yet). Also post some system specs to compare to. This game is pretty demanding and the biggest difference I saw in any of the settings I played with was playing in full screen mode.

I know AoC has a pop-up window if you don't have SP1 for Vista. Maybe check to make sure you have all the updates. You could even try an earlier driver to see if you get better performance. Check temps on your card as well, maybe its getting too hot.

I'm running 8800GT(x2) on Vista 32bit and I'm getting around 60s fps.

One thing i did was go into my windows nvidia setting and actully change the setting that says to Preload fram set that to max mine is max preload 8 frames i use a 8800 gts 320 mb

thanks for the replys, will work on it a lil more in the morning when i get in from work.

I actually went from 6400+ black edition to phenom 9600 on my asus m2n32-sli (same mobo) and saw a HUGE drop in fps in all my games. crysis went from 40 to 20, just one example. needless to say i quickly returned the phenom and put back in the 6400+.

I believe the phenoms lack in gaming capabilities because the games aren't yet able to use all 4 cores...only 2. so in game you get to 2 2.3 ghz cores in the phenom vs. 2 3.2 ghz cores.

ok, took my 6400+ AM2 and swapped it with his 9600 Phenom, and badda bing everything is better. So phenoms aint that good for Gaming at the moment. At least not in AoC