I was just doing some practice flying using QMB on the Crimea map. My frame rate was pretty good at between 40-60 over the contry side then I made a very low pass over the city. My frame rate dropped to as low as 7. As I pulled away it retruned to normal. Ther were no other airplanse and I turned off AAA. I used to do this all the time on my old rig and never noticed that larg of a frop in FR near the city. This doesn't seem to be a problem on-line as I don't barnstorm towns in combat. I have seen it when there are a lot of other plans and AAA around but its not nearly as bad.

I am running at 1920x1200 32bit. I have the game settings maxed out. I have turned off AA and AF. Does that FR drop look normal given my rig and settings?

Something is wrong.
I have half the system you do, and I don't have any Frame rate problems, even with the flak and AAA going on.

Alot of people have been having problems lately with their newer builds it seems. Just shows you, newer tech is not always better.

Hope you get it sorted.

check out this thread, it's a guy with the same issue.

http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/49310655/m/1561073076/p/1

I have an 8600GT and I had to fiddle around a fair bit with the conf.ini and Nvidia control panel settings to make the game run as smoothly as possible.

Try making the game run on your different cores with the processaffinitymask function in conf.ini. Also make sure to turn off threaded optimization in the nvidia control panel because the game doesn't run well on multiple cores...and there is a lot of other stuff you can try especially in the nvidia panel...

Anyway you should usually see a noticeable frame rate drop over a large city but 7 fps sounds way too low.

Here's a bit more...

This is my current Black Death results:

4870, 155641, 10, 63, 31.290

This is what I got doing what I did before in the Cirmea map:

8512, 202385, 5, 63, 42.058

This time I noticed that the big hit only came when I was over the residential buildings. When I buzzed the factory areas there was hardly any hit at all. Same for the ships out in the water.

I've recorded the track so I can accurately compare results.

Also, this weekend I am intalling a second 8800GT. Can't wait to see what happens then.

I found something (thanks for pointing me to that other thread). I did the following in the NVidia Control Panel:

Set Multi-Display/Mixed-GPU acceleration to "Single display performance mode"

Set Threaded Optinization to "Off".

The Black Death is now:

7707, 155725, 16, 63, 49.491

My Test Track is now:

10922, 198958, 18, 63, 54.896

While the numbers still don't look that great, the perceived results are much, much better.

Case closed for now.

Thanks all again.

Reduce visibility distance - less objects will need to load their textures into your video card. A second pass should not show the fps drop either since textures are loaded already then.

MaxMhz, that surely would make a difference if I needed to fly at treetop level over towns a lot.

The worst hit (18 FPS) occurs when I have a long oblique view from a very sallow angle of a large area of small buildings at a very low altitude. In reality, I don't think I ever do that in game. Even in high trafic with a lot of AAA, things are still really smooth now.

Thanks for the suggestion.