I've had this game since only a little after it was released, and up until about a month ago, it has never lagged on Medium Detail settings, and has only showed a slight bit of lag in High settings. Now, though, I can't even escape lag on Low settings, with all of my background programs turned off. What it does, is it begins relatively free of lag, but about one to two minutes into the game, it starts lagging very badly and doesn't stop.
At first, I thought it must be a virus, so I did a few scans with McAfee and Avast! anti virus. No difference. The game still lagged. I also defragged the computer, did a disk cleanup, and now I'm kind of stumped as to what caused this sudden lapse of performance. I'm sort of thinking that maybe something broke in the actual machine...
Does anyone have any suggestions on what to try? It would be greatly appreciated, because I can't take it. I. Need. To. Play. This. Game.
Thanks.