I'm playing Gothic 2 on a fairly up to date machine (XP SP3, quad-core Q6600, 4GB RAM, Radeon 4870 video card) on widescreen (1680 x 1050). However even with visual settings on low, I get terrible performance outdoors - dipping into zero figures.
Weirdly enough, lowering the view distance doesn't help this - even when it's all fog in front of my nose, it's still the same. Anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks
P.

I have a couple of things you can try to see if that sort your low fps problem out.
First change the game to run under windows 98 compatiblilty mode.
You could also set the game to run on a single cpu core, core0 is your best bet.
Playing about with both video and sound hardware acceleration may also solve this.
If none of those work I would try to change the resolution from what it is to 1024x768 or something just to see if that fixes it.

I'm having similar troubles on a Radeon 4870. I have seen other posts with 48xx owners having performance issues with Gothic 2 on Gothic forums, though I have seen a few 48xx owners who solved their issues.
You can try downgrading your drivers, which seemed to work for some. Or, go into \system\Gothic.ini and change the values that look like:
zTexCacheOutTimeMSec=960000
zTexCacheSizeMaxBytes=512000000
zSndCacheOutTimeMSec=40000
zSndCacheSizeMaxBytes=80000000
Your numbers will be lower, because G2 was shipped based on assuming 512 MB of RAM. I've quadrupled most of the values to ensure that textures stay loaded in RAM, improving performance.
It's really a shame since I had great performance on a P4, 512 MB RAM, Radeon 9700 Pro when I first played Gothic 2. Now, with a Core 2 Duo, 3 GB RAM, and a Radeon 4870, I'm having slightly worse performance. I'm trying to avoid downgrading drivers but I don't know what else to do, since the tweak I mentioned above only provided slight improvements.

Thanks; I may try those .ini changes _and_ downgrading my drivers, since I'm also having freezing problems (not just in Gothic 2, in other games and videos) which I think are driver related - version 9.4 was the last drivers which didn't cause me problems in fact.
P.

I suspect you've got some dual-core, OS , drivers issue or such. The game (G2) runs smoothly at max settings on my old rig, an Athlon2400 w/6600GT (128MB AGP) vid card ! I've even added improved textures (german mod)...
My PC is a bicycle compared to your rockets, you should have much better perfs !

I'm afraid it's entirely related to ATI drivers. After changing only one factor in this equation - graphic card from radeon 4850 to old gforce 8600 the framerate skyrocketeted to whooping 40-60 fps. Gothic 2 is one of my favourite games of old times. Sadly, If i want to play it, I have to change the graphic card, huge minus for ATI and their drivers :(

I dunno. I have the latest ATi drivers(HD5850) on Win7 64bit and the game runs fine for me.

No idea then. Anyway, I finished Gothic 2 (for like, fifth time ever?) in August 2010. In order to do so I took a liberty of borrowing graphic card from my girlfriend - since at that time she had an inteagrated graphic adaptor, it wasn't a problem :) Now I'm preparing to play Gothic 3 - enhanced edition, with the newest community patch. So far it looks darn impressive.

I had similar problems; ATI card too (3600 series). Funny, increasing the distance seemed to actually HELP a bit. It appears to happen in rocky areas like the pass into the Valley of Mines, on top of mountains, and within cities mostly. Was a real problem if a fight was happening but otherwise mainly an irritant. I never really found a work around.