Acer Aspire 5742G
Intel Core i5 m460 @ 2.53GHZ
4GB RAM
64-bit Windows 7
Nvidia GEFORCE GT 540M 1GB

My computer should run this game as a hot knife through butter, yeh? It doesn't.

I am experiencing heavy lag and stutter with everything expect the loading pages. .ini tweaks and the good ol' 360 spin does nothing but a near undetectable improvement.

I'm at the end of my ropes, here. This game feels more and more like a waste of good money and time. Which is sad, for a Bethesda game.

Anyone got ANY idea what to do?

Have you tried lower the graphic resolution and various graphical settings? The NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M isn't that powerful.

Wrong - the recommended graphics card is a GTX 460 or HD 5850 and this rough guide comparison
http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=632&card2=666
shows that your GPU has about *HALF* the texture handling power needed so its bound to be performing poorly.

While correct I get issues and my card is almost double the power of the recommended requirements so the game definitely needs an optimization patch. My card can chew DX HR with Morphological AA on DX 11 cranked everything to max with 64x tesselation apart...this dx9 unreal junk should be running way better than it is.

Unfortunately, it's not - and that's down to nVidia's misleading card naming...

The GTX 540M is much less powerful than the GTX 460 (Tom's Hardware hierarchy for October 2012 pitches it at the same level as an old-style nVidia 7800 GTX whereas the 460 GTX recommended for the game is much higher up the chart, ranking with the 560 and even the new 650 card - see http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/gaming-graphics-card-review,review-32549-7.html). The naming is misleading because the first number only indicates the chip series, whereast the last two numbers indicate the performance level within the chip series. So, whilst your card is a 'series 5' for chipset, it's performance is well below the '60' aspect of a 260, 460 etc. This is most likely your bottleneck.

It should be noted that Torth is not the OP and per their signature their card is a 6970, not the OP's card (540M).

My issue was a conflict from an old copy of Splinter Cell Conviction.

I think Skinnyhounds reply was just mis quoted as you can see he is referring to the 540M.

My apologies - yes, a quote that went wrong. I was indeed referring to the original poster's 540M (and nVidia's naming anomalies that misleadingly suggest a 540 ought to be better than a 460, when it's actually the reverse).

Which I totally endorse.....the numbers that matter for nvidia are the last two....first is just a series number. So skinny has the best nvidia gpu from last series......I don't count the 590 as it is a sandwich card. That said I still think this game could use some better optimization....hopefully the patch is taking a while because it is going to be of substance.