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So I bought a cheap graphics card so I can play some MMOs more smoothly with the wife. We started playing Rift recently. Now I get the card installed yesterday and have Rift a trial run. I turned it to ultra, and whether or not it really was ultra doesn't matter really, because the game looked just awesome, way nice than I've ever seen it.

Now, I tested it out for a good 30 minutes doing various things and it ran steady around 32fps. So I shut it off and a few hours later the wife and I play. Problem is now, it is gaking the bed. I had to turn it down to low and it wouldn't go past 20 fps no matter what I did. Ideas to fix this? It's an Nvidia card, I've updated drivers and even made sure the computer didn't change back to the original POS I had originally.

All I've found out so far, is that Rift is known for pooping on people's frame rates, even on really impressive PC. My thing though, is I'd like to try and get back what I had for those first 30 minutes, or hell half that would be better

Well, if it genuinely is Rift, then there's not much you can do other than report it to the developer and/or Nvidia and hope they can patch it.

A couple of other things you can check, though:
1) make sure there aren't any background programs running that are taking up a lot of resources. In particular, security software like virus scanners can gum up the works but most of the better ones now have a "silent/gaming mode" which can greatly reduce the chance of it kicking up a fuss. I love Avast! for this in particular.

2) as it's an MMO, you'll be relying on network speed - not so much the final upload/download speed, as the latency. This can slow things down to make it *seem* like a framerate drop, so make sure you're not downloading anything else while you play. Also, surreptitiously remove the power supplies/batteries from everybody else's devices that could be using it too.

3) again, as it's an MMO, Rift requires more RAM than most games to run nicely. This may well be where a cheaper card will fall down. You can mitigate this by dropping down any settings for draw distance and caching things like decals or bullet holes (ok, so you won't be getting the latter in Rift, but you get the idea).

Well I made a few discoveries yesterday.
1. It's Rift for sure. I load up WoW just to see, and I can't crank it to ultra, but I can still make it look really nice with decent fps, so I know it isn't on my end.
2. I was looking at EVERYTHING rift has to offer and realized I had clicked some option for really cranking the pretty and it's very GPU intensive. I turned it off and suddenly my frame rate came back. It's not QUITE as pretty as the first time but it's a whole lot better looking and with mid 30s to boot which I'm fine with.