Major slowdown issues from a major noob : General & Trouble Shooting

The game runs great out on the isle of refuge but slows to a crawl in Qeynos. I have turned down all the graphics options but still it chugs along.

Is there a way that I can reduce to the screen to about half full screen? All idiot proof guides appreciated. Many thanks.

All the cities are like that unless you wicked awesome video card(or SLI system). Try this in the cities: ALT-O for options, then PERFORMANCE, and choose (ugh blanking here) the one that is the least detail. Play around with the choices to see which is the fastest for you. If opt for the best performance much of everything will look blobby...but it's better thank the slow jerkiness of quality. Then change it back to balanced or just a little better performance when you go out in the open. You might have select performance more with indoor zones other than the cities as well.

Hope that helps.

The quick-and-easy way would be
Options -> Display -> Performance Profile
(note your current setting)
-> Extreme Performance

Otherwise, set almost everything in Display to the unchecked, MIN or off choices.

And, though it's unlikely to change your framerates, it's not a bad idea to defrag your HDD(s); and if you use a page file, set it to a static size (and then defrag).

Thanks a lot, relieved that it's not just my system. I have followed the advice given and it has helped some.

A killer video card will help, but more memory was the answer for me. I was trying to get by on a mimimun video card and 512 meg ram. I put in a gig ram in one machine and killer video in the other. I ended up buying more ram for the machine with the killer video card, cause the memory seemed to help the performance more than the upgrade to the video card. (of course the new video card looks better....) but you are just asking about performance.

For a SUPER performance boost with fairly good quality, set your performance to Very High and your Complex Shader Distance to -1. This will darken the game a bit, and you won't be able to see your torches, so you will have to turn up the Brightness OR the Gamma.

Arre (Damn I'm Good) with a Smile

asside from the obvious (more memory, better video card) 2 issues that I've personaly found to help performance:
defrag your HD. nuff said.
the most often overlooked hardware issue is inadequate power supply- if you've added hardware, or built your own PC, many times the PSU you have is straining. Hell, I threw an old 200w psu on my DVD player (set top) and noticed a huge performance increase!

lol, i don't think a DVD player is the same as the hardware components of a computer. Generally if you don't have a big enough PSU then your computer just won't work, or some parts won't work.
But you carry a half truth. Most video cards these days suck up a lot of power and therefore have an extra plug on the card that you can plug a PSU power connector into. The card doesn't require it to run, but if it doesn't have it then it doesn't preform as good as it should.

Make sure you have at least 1 GB of ram minimum. Otherwise you screwed and you will lag all the time.