Here is my system information


Intel Core i7 CPU 950 @ 3.07GHz 2.79 GHz
EVGA X58 FTW3 Motherboard
2x Geforce GTX 560 Duke Nukem special edition video cards
6 GB RAM
Windows 7 64bit professional


Here is my problem.

I start a new game of Rage and everything is fine. High frames, no lag, the works. Game looks amazing. I take the first main quest and go to the Ghost Hideout and clear the place out. Still the game runs perfectly. Upon exiting the instance and returning to The Wasteland my framerate drops to somewhere between 1 and 3 or 4 frames. If I try to move end of story game essentially locks up. If I stop ALL movement the game appears to return to normal but the second I try to move again down goes the frames back to unplayable. This will go on for a minute or two and the game will slowly clear itself up and become completely fine again. After this happens the first time it happens completely random after that. I went to the sewers just down the road from the hideout and entered and exited to see if it would happen again. Sure enough the frames went to hell in a hand basket again before clearing up after the same amount of time, 2 or 3 minutes.

I have tried everything I can think of to fix this. Defaulted every setting in game and out in the nvidia control panel. I turned them all on and off one at at time. Same results. I have reverted back as many as 4 generations of drivers. Same deal. I have uninstalled/re-installed the game two different ways. First from a direct Steam downloan to straight from CD install. Same thing. This is my last resort before I pull the plug on the game all together and just forget about it. No other software does anything like this at all. I am a shooter player and also play Rift and nothing like this happens on any other game I play. In fact I was playing Battlefield 3 earlier and it runs just plain beautiful.

Does anyone have any idea what this issue might be and any suggestions on a possible fix? Hell i'd settle with a work-around that will just make it playable. I really don't want to have to give up on playing this game but i'm afraid I may have no choice.

Thanks in advance for anyones input.

Did you try setting power saving to max performance? NV have (unfortunately) been fiddling around with power saving behaviour in driver releases since 2.80 and it's not done them any favours (I ended up jumping to AMD after using nothing but NV since the TNT2 as a result of that).