Hey there,

I've had Mass Effect installed for a while now, but just can't play it due to the appalling performance I get. If you take a look at my PC's specs you should find that I overshoot the recommended requirements for the game by quite a way, but this isn't how the story is when it comes to actually playing the game.

These are the settings Mass Effect automatically sets itself to.

1024x768
Particles: High
Textures: High
Filtering: Point
Dynamic Shadows: Yes
VSync: No
Windowed Mode: No

And I turned both film grain and motion blur off myself.

Now, to show the FPS performance I get from various views in the very opening scene, I've taken some screenshots with FPS overlays.

















Now as you can see, the FPS performance I'm getting is extremely poor compared to my hardware and what this game needs. The movement of the characters and camera start to judder when you get to around 30, and the stuttering is just unbearable at 15FPS. I've heard of people with under 2GHz single-core CPUs and 7-series GPUs able to play this game. Altering my graphics settings doesn't seem to have any effect on performance, and my system should max the settings anyway.

I'm really very stumped. I just don't know what to try. My graphics drivers are up-to-date. My overclock is stable - though I played the game when I was at 2.2GHz stock speed and the performance was the same.

So, any help is appriciated.
Thank you.

Hello Its Just Me and welcome to the PCHF

Our gamers here will help you as soon as possible.............thanks for your patience.....

Thank you for your welcome. I hope to get this problem resolved, I'm not in any great rush however. Looking forward to having a chance at playing the game properly though.

Is the game fully patched and up to date? I know just how bad the 360 build of the game was in the graphics department... Maybe update your Direct X drivers, have you O.C'd anything else? can you restore all the clock speeds and try again.

The game is up-to-date. Nothing else is overclocked, apart from the GPU being factory OC'd, and the game ran exactly the same before I overclocked anything anyway. I've had it lying around on my HDD for a while, when at first it didn't perform well I gave it a miss, now I'd really like to get into it.

I will have a look for a DirectX update.

Cool, keep us updated.

I installed the August 2009 update for DirectX, restarted and played the game again. It's still horribly under performing.

Just to be sure I checked my GPU driver once again, and it's full up to date.

As a measure of this PCs normal gaming performance:

BioShock - Maximum settings, 1280x1024 resolution, 50-60+ FPS average, 30-40 FPS lowest, from what I have experienced.

Race Driver: GRID - Maximum settings, 1280x1024 resolution, 30 FPS lowest, usually varies between 40-60, always silky smooth.

The Witcher - Mix of high settings, 1280x1024 resolution, 60+ FPS, lowest around 30 FPS when in busy cities with many NPCs and visuals.