I've been getting really low framerates in this game
 

So I just bought this game recently after getting somewhat (though not entirely) tired of playing Gothic 3.

So I seldom ever get frame rates above 30. I tried lowering the quality and it did nothing.

Specs;
Processor: AMD Athlon II x3 445 ~3.10 GHz
RAM: 8GB
OS: Win 7 64-bit
Video card: MSI Twin Frozr II GTX 570

It's really odd that I'm getting this lag with the GPU I have. Could it be the fact that I'm running a 64 bit OS? I tried using NTCores 4 GB patch, but the game didn't run after that. I do actually have a 32 bit copy I could use, so I might try that next.

Oh, also I'm using the steam version, which should come with the patch.

Gothic 3 was notorious for running poorly without tweaking its .ini files so maybe there are similar tweaks for Risen? Look around on the web for sites that may explain what to do.

What I found was that Risen often does not work with nvidia, and that there's no immediate fix unless Nvidia fixes it in their driver update.
I'm installing Risen right now in my 32 bit installation, I'll see how that goes.

All I found by way of INI tweaks were to make the game look better.

If the game uses executable encryption (ie, requires steam to at least be running in offline mode to launch) then most methods of LAA patching will cause it to fail as it causes decryption to fail.

The problem you are describing sounds more like an issue with base settings for memory utilization and caching being horribly inappropriate. I'd check those first and if that doesn't work it might be horribly unoptimized filters or SSAO or mouse acceleration.

Here's a good thread with lots of ini optomization tips:
http://forum.nordicgames.at/showthre…erform-better!

It contains both visual AND performance improvements and gives some insight into what the various settings do. So if the basic performance tips don't work it might at least give you clues to what you might want to turn down by looking at the visual improvement descriptions. Often I've found that on my nVidia GPUs I get staggeringly better performance for slight decreases in various antialiasing settings in games that produce this lag.

EDIT: fixed link

I was talking about Risen, you linked my to a thread on Gothic 3. How would I change the settings for memory utilization and caching for Risen? Also, I didn't even see an ssao option in Risen. Is SSAO on by default in Risen?

EDIT: I found out how to disable SSAO in this thread here. Do you know any ways of optimizing memory utilization?

Well, I seem to have found the problem, and it has nothing to do with Risen. My CPU Fan has stopped working.

Weird, I'm surprised your computer would even post. Good thing you found that before it completely fried though. Any idea what temperatures your various probes are detecting? I suppose a high CPU temp, though not catastrophically so, could cause gaming/graphic specific slowdowns on specific chip designs which use on-die PCIE lanes. I'm guessing you have a core i5 (more likely to have this depending on age) or i7?