Been playing this game for a while now and its great except for times when it gets laggy.There are considerable fps drops when there's casting of spells on the screen and the lightning effects they produce.Its especially terrible when I have to fight the barghest boss at the end of chapter 1.I've heard that this is not one of the best optimized games but I've also heard about people who had their lag issues completely fixed and are now playing the game on max settings.I want to know if there are some graphic tweaks or optimizations that can help in the advanced menu options as i never really bothered to check them out.Especially the ones that fix drops caused by these light and fire effects.Otherwise i get an excellent framerate.

My specs

Core 2 duo @ 2.8 Gigs
ATI HD Radeon 4650 VRAM 1 GB
4 Gigs of RAM
Windows XP SP3

Exact same problem here.

Like yoginc, I'm ideally looking for a setting fairly specific to these effects, so I can lessen their HUGE performance hit without degrading the rest of the game, which works very well. I haven't found a satisfying answer here. I suspect that there isn't one.

Elsewhere, I've been told that these effects can be lessened by turning off AA (Anti-aliasing) and Ambient Occlusion. For me, though, Anti-aliasing is already off, and Ambient Occlusion isn't an available setting.

Well if not in the game settings i would like to know if there are any config or .ini kind of files where I could manually change the values for these things. Sometimes u can find in these files values which are not found in the settings in-game.