meh12345

I personally find 40-60 to be very playable. That aside, though, there's something abnormal about your characteristics. A machine beefy enough to get 100+ should manage with maybe 30 FPS loss. Perhaps some more specs would help, if playing with NVidia Inspector (or CCC) doesn't help. Single biggest thing you can do will be turning AA down. Aside from that, try Realistic Lighting With Customization, maybe combined with FXAA PPI.

That's impressive even for save game bloat :) I don't think I could imagine trying to play even at 50 megs, the 20 when I noticed was already really bad. So, go through your saves and find the point where they start increasing rapidly. It's obviously easier if you've got a lot of saves like I did, but the pattern I saw was that it was fluctuating between 10 and 11 megs (going like 10.3, 10.4, 10.2, 104, 10.5, 10.3, and so on) and then went 10.5 -> 11 -> 11.5 etc. Obviously your exact numbers will be different but hopefully you'll see something like that. If not, you'll have to guess more. When you've found it, play a little while (couple hours) with all mods still disabled, save often, and make sure it stays pretty stable and hopefully even goes up and down a bit. Then start re-enabling mods maybe a few at a time.

Check your save files, they'll almost certainly be bloated to tens of megs. The lag starts being noticeable around 20 megs and it's exactly like you describe your symptoms, starting at a few seconds and increasing the bigger the file gets. You can try disabling the offending mods (see below) and then waiting a few in-game days to see if the files go back down to normal size. If not, the only option is to go to a save file that's still in the normal range (look for when the increases were small) and restart from there, disabling the offending mods and/or keeping an eye on the size, reverting and trying different mods until it works normally. The two mods that I know of that cause save file bloat are Adventurers & Travelers, and the previous version of Dynavision (the new version has fixed it). There are surely others too, because Papyrus sucks and the save system sucks.

I'm not sure why everyone's so down on placebos. If it works, just roll with it :)

Yes, Cobwebmaster, you can find mods for that (even in this thread, but it's probably better to just search on Nexus).

It's quite possible increase your average FPS without increasing the maximum, or simply remove stuttering and so on. Video memory amount and speed probably help a lot.

I believe this is a known ATI/AMD problem. Try searching threads about ATI cards.

Good thing I've got a backup copy of .21...

(Also, in interest of accuracy, the Witcher video guards weren't "heavily" armoured. They just had breastplates ;)

That's pretty much it. Your character was, I suppose, mostly meant to be played in first-person view and therefore lacks expressions. There are some mods that help a bit, but the options for altering/adding e.g. lip shapes even statically are pretty lacking.

"... you can see how a dagger wielding assassin could be capable of killing heavy armored enemies - well, it doesn't really show what we want to achieve, but you know... its a cool cinematic:D" As you know, I'm heavily in favour of dangerous daggers. I must point out, however, that referring to a movie (or nowadays a game) is never an acceptable argument when discussing realism :) (It's just a peeve of mine. You weren't particularly serious about it, I think, but I'm constantly amazed by the number of people who talk about a TV show or a movie as if it was real.)

@tomislawus: Good news! I've implemented the feature. It does require a small bit of effort on your part: stop saving your game. :)

Nope, sadly I'm seeing regression again. With 2 x GTX 560 using 295.51, I've an average of somewhere around 50 FPS (the range is something like 40 up to 80). The new driver drops me to 25-30, so rolling back once again. I should probably mention this on the NVidia forums...

Can you just tfc to wherever they are before getting too close?

Ah, let's give this a try… 295.73 was really, really bad for my system (295.51 works fine). Hopefully this'll end up better.