[M. Sarsfield]

DeepIron,

After playing with the nVidia settings, the best frame rate that I can get in 1.5 vanilla is about 39 fps, if I let the view forward on the bridge "settle out" for a few seconds - i.e. don't move the view. My resolution is set at 1440x900 and I let the application control the AA and AF settings in the control panel. In game, I have everything turned on in the graphics menu, excpet for PPF and v-Sync. Most sliders are mid-range.

I figured out that SLI mode was causing the frame rate to be around 25 fps on the bridge. Turning it off gave me a 15 fps boost. This is unfortunate, since I bought the second card hoping that it would improve the game's performance. I'm guessing that SHIV doesn't like SLI very much - at least not the EVGA 7600 GT duo. I've tried just about every SLI option in the interface with no difference in performance.

I'm going to upgrade to the latest nVidia driver and see if anything else improves. I'm impressed that you're getting 40 -45 fps. I assume that this is in external view. My internal view peaks in the 70's, if I look up at the ceiling, and around the 50's, if I look around the room.

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UPDATE:

I downloaded the latest nVidia Beta driver and I was immediately impressed with the improvements that they made to the control panel. I like the fact that they have recommended settings based on your hardware setup - I made a few changes, though. Without SLI mode in 1.5 vanilla I was getting about 41 to 42 fps on the bridge - looking forward for all tests. I switched to SLI mode and dropped to 33, but after some more tweaking got it back up to 40 fps. I then installed RSRDC, it's patch, and PE2 without any other mods or PE options. I noticed a small boost in fps, so I tweaked nVidia a little more for quality and still managed about 39 - 40 fps.

The newest nVidia driver seems to like SLI mode a lot better than the previous versions, but the other features are an even bigger bonus. I highly recommend downloading it, even if your using a single video card. Two thumbs up to the nVidia dev team.

I should also mention that I removed nTuner from my system. I think that it was causing some performance issues after I installed a second video card.