Does the game benefit from the quad-core CPUs at all? I am trying to play on a Core i7 iMac 8Gb of RAM ATI 5750 1Gb in W7 64 through bootcamp. The game does not run smoothly on high settings at all. I get satisfactory performance on medium settings in 1920:1080 resolution. By satisfactory I mean about 25 FPS, which I don't find satisfactory at all. Lowering the resolution doesn't change much.

Do you think my computer is just slow or is it just the drivers issue? On second thought the only game that performed bad on my computer was King Arthur the Role-Playing-Wargame.

I think its because your running it on an iMAC,yeh i know some games run fine on bootcamp but plenty dont and its not the games fault.The game does use all cores from what ive read.

About 30-35 fps on my computer. Haven't checked my wife's but she's not complaining either.

In DirectX 9 games (as TW2) your graphics card is not significantly faster than mine (ATI 4770), and my experience is similar to yours. So that is very likely the bottleneck.
You might want to try overclocking your card a bit (but do research before what is generally considered "safe" for your card) or buy a new one.

[edit] There was a benchmark that showed quite nice performance progression with the number of CPU cores, but that was done with a GTX 580 graphics card. I doubt that progression is as nice for slower cards like yours and mine.
Link to benchmark (only German, sorry!):
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,825004/The-Witcher-2-im-Technik-Test-Grafikkarten-und-CPU-Benchmarks-plus-Grafikvergleich-Update-Sechskern-CPUs/Rollenspiel-Adventure/Test/

I'm also in the unlucky camp with:

AMD Phenom 2 X4 965 3.4GHz
4 GB 1600 DDR3
Sapphire 5870 1GB Vapor-X (Cat 11.5)
Win 7 64bit
1920x1200

The same 25-30 FPS count, occasional stuttering, slow mouse in the menu etc. with all max except ubersampling, cinematic blur and motion blur... Also the same performance when turned to Low spec., almost no difference at all.

Oh, BTW running @ native 1680x1050... also didn't run FRAPS to get actual FPS values, but it was obviously choppy w/no tweaking @ medium...

Just for comparison (on the off chance that it may help to provide an overview of where problems are occurring for others), my game is running smooth as silk, basic spec and settings below:

AMD Phenom II quad core 3.40GHz
4 Gb RAM
XFX HD5850 1Gb GPU (Catalyst 11.4 drivers)
Win 7 Home Premium (64bit)

Settings:
Res: 1920 x 1080
Fullscreen: Enabled
Tex Downscaling: None
Tex Mem Size: Large
Shadow Qual: Ultra
Shadowed Lights: Ultra
LOD: Far
Bloom: Enabled
Light Shafts: Enabled
Anti-aliasing: Enabled
Blur Effects: Enabled
Depth of Field: Enabled
Vignette: Enabled
Wet Surfaces: Enabled
SSAO: Enabled
Motion Blur: Enabled
Cinematic DoF: Enabled
DoF Cutscenes: Enabled
Dangling objects limit: Disabled
UberSampling: Disabled
Vertical Sync: Enabled
Decals: High Spec

Well, the benchmark seems to be for the high detail setting. I would expect the game to improve in the FPS department on lower settings, but it does not show any drastic improvement.

Dear Friends

I have tested every case on my system and... Conclusion:

My system:

OS: Windows 7 x64 Ultimate
CPU: Intel i5-750 2.66GHz Quad Core
GPU: ATI Gigabyte 5850 1GB 256bit
RAM: 4GB 1333MHz DDR3

Res: 1920x1080
Fullscreen: Enabled
Tex Downscaling: None
Tex Mem Size: Large
Shadow Qual: Ultra
Shadowed Lights: Ultra
LOD: Normal
Bloom: Enabled
Light Shafts: Enabled
Anti-aliasing: Enabled
Blur Effects: Enabled
Depth of Field: Enabled
Vignette: Enabled
Wet Surfaces: Enabled
SSAO: Enabled
Motion Blur: Enabled
Cinematic DoF: Enabled
DoF Cutscenes: Enabled
Dangling objects limit: Disabled
UberSampling: Disabled
Vertical Sync: Enabled
Decals: High Spec

SSAO may be enabled it's not affecting on FPS at all.
Ubersampling must be disable, very affecting on FPS - min 7 FPS
V-Sync may be enabled, it's not affecting on FPS as much, only -1 FPS drops (it's not much).
Triple buffering Direct3D or OpenGL, not affecting on FPS.

FPS min: 21
FPS max: 45
FPS avg: 33

Morphological AA should be disabled, affecting on FPS: -5 to -7 FPS drops.

Best regards.

Sincerely

1. You have a 5870m which is a low end version of a 5870, which (in comparing desktop versions) is slightly better than a 4890 (4890 and a 5770 are for the most part equal, slightly behind the 4890 in some cases)
2. your CPU, regardless of four cores, is a mobile version and is under 2GHz. This is typical of laptops, but isn't very fast regardless of number of cores. If possible (I've never done this on a laptop) try upping that to like 2.5GHz or so and you should see a noticable improvement. I dont know what kind of heat or power that will put out either.

While I don't have an I7 (just a phenom II x3 720 oc'd to 3.2ghz) I have a similarly powered card? (hd4890 1GB) and I have to play it on medium-high at 1920x1200.

The game runs horribly for me as well, I'm getting an average of 25 fps even on high with extreme framedrops (<10 fps) during battles. My PC should be able to run it on ultra (without ubersampling) without problems:

i7-2600K, ATI RADEON HD 6990

On ultra, Ubersampling OFF
running flawlessly. ATI 6970.

I really would like to understand what's the reason for this.
some people can play perfectly, others aren't.

Ive posted this in other threads, but ill post it again since your problem seems to be yet another ati related one.


I had an 5870 and regardless of settings i could not get anymore than 15-20 fps.

By implementing these tweaks i got my fps up to 45 fps on everything high (DoF and uber =off).

1. Run the game in windowed mode.

2. Enable Vssync and force it on with RadeonPro

3. Disable anti aliasing (also in radeon pro)

4. Max the Flip Size queue in Radeon Pro

5. Enable all optimizations available in Radeon pro

6. Fake the game to think the Graphics card is an Nvidia 465 GTX using RadeonPro (VendorID is 0x10DE)

Those rates are fine. Some people have unreasonable expectations (not everyone, some are having legit issues).