So I bought this for $2.49 during the Steam Sale, I always heard great things about it but I figured I'd wait for a sale because I love a cel-shaded look in high definition. Being a 2008 game I thought it was relatively safe to max out the settings and for the tutorial up until it opens out onto the plains it was looking fantastic at a solid 60 fps. Running towards the tree-temple thing I got huge drops in frames from 60 to 30 for no apparent reason.

I tried monkeying around to see what was causing the framerate to halve and I couldn't nail down what was doing it. According to fraps, the framerate wasn't dropping when looking at anything in particular. The framerate would just dive when walking forward.

According to the Ubisoft forum, there's no difference between "Medium and High" graphics quality when you have high res textures enabled apart from serious performance drops on the High setting. When I set it to medium, the game looked no different and ran at 60 with no dips whatsoever. Everything else was maxed during all this.

Have any of you guys had this issue? I'm guessing plenty of people will have picked this one up during the sale.

I literally have no idea about PC specs so here there's if something about them will explain this weirdness: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2400 CPU @ 3.10GHz, RAM: 4gb,GeForce GTS 450 2.7gb. I do know that they're all above the recommended settings.

GTS 450 would not be sufficient to max this with a consistent 60fps, the performance you're getting is normal. The good news is the plains leading towards the tree temple is probably the most demanding part of the game, your performance should be fine in most of the other areas.

@Geno: Thanks, although the message boards dated back to 08 were having the same dips on cards that aren't even in production now. Are there any other spots where the game gets hairy? I wouldn't mind if I could cap it at 30 if it would just stay consistent.