Not too long ago, I set out to play through the original BioShock in anticipation of its recently released sequel. Many of you have probably done the same, even if only to get a refresher course on BioShock’s unique setting and storyline.
And those of you who have tried this, have probably run into the same problem I had: BioShock does not play well with recent Nvidia drivers. In fact, it lags as if it were a 4 vs 4 Supreme Commander match running on a single-core processor. This in spite of the fact that the same PC was just recently used to play through Mass Effect 2 with everything maxed out, which ran smooth as butter.
But I’d never played through BioShock before and was determined to get it working right, so after some experimentation I found a solution to this problem!
Here’s what you do to turn BioShock from a stuttering mess into a playable game:
- Right click on your desktop and open the Nvidia Configuration screen.
- Set up a BioShock profile in 3D Settings. If you’ve installed it through Steam then you need to uncheck the ‘Show only programs found on this computer’ checkbox.
- In this BioShock profile, set maximum pre-rendered frames to 0. (I know, it doesn’t make any sense, but it works)
- If you have Fraps running, turn it off. It doesn’t matter if it’s not used for anything, BioShock (at least on Steam) does not play nice with Fraps and will slow down randomly as long as the Fraps processes are running.
- Start BioShock and in options turn off the Horizontal POV Lock option.
Now you should be able to play BioShock without any performance issues.
You could optionally skip the Nvidia driver settings and still gain a hefty performance increase, but I found that it played best with both in-game and driver settings altered.
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