Sudden FPS drops

[Jaffa]

So, for the past few days (maybe since wednesday) I'm experiencing frequent massive FPS drops, no matter what I do or where I am in the game. I did not have any similar problems untill this day (40 hours of playtime). I also did not install any new software/hardware. Steam game cache verification had no effect on this issue.

Any ideas on what may be wrong?

 

My specs:  

OS: Windows 7 Professional
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 760 - v.368.69
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4670k, 3,40GHz
RAM: 16 GB

[Owain]

I've had a similar experience in the last few days as well. Since the Penitent Scholar update my game crashes whenever I enter/leave certain buildings so I decided to leave my 420 day run to start a new game and it's been since then that I've experienced this choppy gameplay.

My pc specs

Windows vista (32-Bit) home premium (service pack 2)
Intel core 2 quad cpu Q9550 @2.83ghz 2.83ghz
4.00 GB RAM
AMD radeon HD 5700 series graphics card

I appreciate my computer is well past it's prime yet I've managed to play the game quite smoothly on medium graphics setting for nearly a year without any fps issues.  It's only been problematic since about midweek.

[Support]

We didn't update the game recently, so I don't really have a suggestion as to why the game would start to have performance issues. Are you sure you're not overriding settings with your Nvidia Panel/Experience. This could also be to something like hard drive fragmentation or even an SSD starting die. You could post your logs for us to have a deeper look as well, but I'm suspecting that they will reveal much in this case. 

[karabass]

I get the 20-40% FPS drop with every breath coming from the mouth, it's so resource-hungry, don't know why.