So, I'm finally home from college and decided to turn on my PC to play Bioshock Infinite. Lo and behold, it runs at a subpar speed no matter what setting I have it on. My computer has an XFX Radeon HD 7870, an Intel I5-3550 with all of the drivers up to date. Does anyone know what the deal might be? It even chugs on medium, and my computer has maxed out the prettiness that is Sleeping Dogs. Does this make sense?

EDIT: So I just tried Sleeping Dogs for the hell of it, and that game too is running at a subpar framerate. I guess this has become a general PC problem? Can anyone help me out?

Typical troubleshooting tips:

1) Roll back all graphic card drivers and re-install them

2) Check GPU for dust accumilation or any signs of damage

3) Format HDD(s) and fresh install Windows.

I have a Gigabyte 7870 and was able to run it at 1080 at all Ultra settings with only the very occasional hiccups: during loading sequences and the first time a zeppelin shows up and you fight it. Other than that it runs extremely smooth. Sleeping Dogs also runs like a dream at max settings.

Install SpeedFan and make note of your case/cpu temps as well as the video card temp that the AMD tray is giving you. Also make sure to run the Beta amd drivers. I know that sounds weird, but since they stopped doing monthly driver updates, beta is the way to go even from their developers' mouths. It is stable and you don't need to worry about it damaging anything.

Try a number of graphics intensive games and see if the issue continually pops up. If it does, then the problem is not with the game but with either drivers or hardware.

My first inclination would be to check PC temperature and see if there's anything going wrong there. I would check GPU temp, CPU temp, and if any of your fans are defective (although one defective fan shouldn't be that destructive unless you're overclocking). As with everyone else, check out the drivers and play with those to see any differences.

If it's a game-wide issue than my guess would be to check hardware first but it could be a number of things.

Disable Alternative post processing if you have it enabled, it's a high accuracy depth of field technique that can be pretty hard on a lot of machines. Additionally you can drop the shadow detail from Ultra/Very High to high, the top 2 tiers use a rendering technique in which the edges of shadows will fade away as they are projected out instead of being a hard lined edge (it also ups the resolution).