Seem to be having trouble with this game getting very frame-y and can't determine what it is. I'm basically running Jeff's machine (that Will Smith built) upgraded with a GTX 670 card, 8GB Ram, Core i5 2500K, and am updated to the latest drivers. Futzing with the settings doesn't seem to help much, unless I'm missing something - I've even changed the AA in the Nvidia control panel to 8x and it still doesn't help.

The menu when I load up seems fine, but once gameplay/cutscenes start, it slows down to barely playable levels. I played this game on the PS3 originally and wasn't expecting this with the PC version :/

Turning SSAO off really helped my framerates.

@MikkaQ: Thanks for the suggestion, but that didn't work for me.

Bummer.

@WJist: I don't see why you should have any problems with that hardware. In a situation like this I always think of some sort of driver or software problem. You said you took care of drivers though, so now I'm scratching my head. What settings are you running the game at? What kind of anti-aliasing? I don't know man, but more information wouldn't hurt.

The game runs smooth as butter on my pretty low-medium end machine. 3GHz Core2Duo, Radeon HD 5770, 4GB RAM. I am playing it at 720p, though, and I turned SSAO off. Everything else is on the highest setting. Only time it would go below 30FPS is when I am driving as fast as I can through the cities.

Played it on an AMD 5870 and a 7950 and had no issues.

Could you set all your eye-candy stuff driver level to Application Select? You mentioned you had AA set to 8x in the driver. I don't remember if Sleeping Dogs has AA in its own options. They might not play nice.

Your hardware should be fine; I ran it at or above 50 90% of the time (except for driving way fast during the day) on an i7 920 and a GTX 560 Ti. Everything mostly maxed (maybe AA and/or shadows on mid) and SSAO off.

@Subjugation: Drivers at 310.90.

@Subjugation:

@WJist: So you're saying you have the frame drops with the settings from those screenshots? That's crazy.

Your control panel doesn't look like anything funky is going on. From what I can see you haven't fiddled with any forced AA or anything like that. Everything looks like it's application controlled, which is good.

But seriously, you dropped the game settings down to that and you're still having frame drops? That is just way too fishy. I would do some digging to see if others are having issues with those drivers. Are they released drivers or beta drivers? Beta drivers can be trouble sometimes.

Le sigh. I guess I'll wait for another patch for the frame rate/stuttering to improve on my end. Bumping down drivers didn't work, messing with the AA settings didn't work, editing the XML didn't work...the magic of PC gaming! Thanks anyway, everyone!

It took me a painfully slow hour to get from the opening cut scene of Wei running away from the cops to Jackie talking to you in the Night Market :/

That is pretty weird considering from what it looks like your not even running the high res texture pack. I know when I had that on that's when I started getting noticeable frame rate issues. Good luck, I played with them which didn't bother me a whole lot.

man I have a 5770 and I was running that thing at like a straight 30, tried reinstalling?

Wow, that makes no sense. I have a 660ti and I'm going at 60 with everything nearly maxed at 1080p. What do you mean by frame drops? Like is the framerate dipping hard below 30? Do you ever get 60 frames and is this the only game you have this problem with?

When I played the demo it was really smooth on a machine with lower specs than you. That was with everything turned to max but AA and SSAO. Can't say how the full game would perform but based on the settings and specs you are showing you should be fine. What is your framerate average? And do you ever have trouble in other games?

I have the same set up as you and I can play it fine. Weird.

Just tried reinstalling, same issue. I have the same issue actually with Spec Ops: The Line and Witcher 2, which leads me to believe it might be a DirectX thing? Weirdly, it doesn't impact similar third-person or first-person games like Dead Space or Hitman or more demanding games like XCOM. It's a mystery to me.

@WJist: I'm running ~50fps on extreme with HD textures with vsync and AntiAliasing off. I have a 560 GTX. You shouldn't be having these issues have you tried using the benchmark feature in advanced settings? Could you post a screenshot of the resullts?

@WJist said:

Seem to be having trouble with this game getting very frame-y and can't determine what it is. I'm basically running Jeff's machine (that Will Smith built) upgraded with a GTX 670 card, 8GB Ram, Core i5 2500K, and am updated to the latest drivers. Futzing with the settings doesn't seem to help much, unless I'm missing something - I've even changed the AA in the Nvidia control panel to 8x and it still doesn't help.

The menu when I load up seems fine, but once gameplay/cutscenes start, it slows down to barely playable levels. I played this game on the PS3 originally and wasn't expecting this with the PC version :/

what is FRAPS telling you the FPS is? I had that issue with the GTX 680 and FRAPS was telling me that the game was running at 120 fps average. The thing about newer cards is that they are laggy and have issues keeping a consistant frame rate (ATI is being proven to be much worse this generation than NVIDIA). Whats happening is the game is running at a fast frame rate and all of a sudden the card lags behind then drops a frame, or the game is running fast and there is just some sudden dip in FPS, the average is still high, but the change in FPS makes the game stutter.

EDIT: Although not a solution, try limiting the games frame rate. Lock the game at 30fps so you remove the peaks and valleys of the frame rate.

@R3Qui4M:

@MonetaryDread: Locking the frame rate at 30 made the issue worse, unfortunately. Weird that newer cards are the laggier ones.