Last night, even after patching, the game worked beautifully. Today, I loaded up the launcher and it decided to re-detect my video settings and set them to "low". What?! I figured I'd just set them back the way I had them, but then when I loaded up my game my FPS dropped into the 10-15 range. I normally run the game on fairly high settings just great, but now even on the default "low" settings my framerate is subpar and the controls are sluggish.

I have an Alienware M11x-R2 with 4gb of RAM. The only thing I can think of is perhaps the game is now trying to use the Intel HD graphics card for some reason. I tried changing the settings in the nVidia control panel but that didn't help at all.

Any help would be appreciated. I can't stand to play the game on low settings =/

What does the NV Launcher/Options say in term of what GPU being used? If it's using the IntelHD it'll say so. Use the drop down listing to select another (if it shows you any, at least), then exit the launcher first, restart launcher, and see if the change 'stuck'.

It did have my integrated card as the only option there. I reinstalled both FNV and my video card drivers. It works fine now. I reinstalled my video card drivers because I updated my antivirus to a new version this morning and I suspect it may have messed up the driver. I don't know for sure, though, since I didn't try it out before uninstalling NV. Oh well. Thanks for the input. Much appreciated.

If you go into your BIOS when your computer is first booting, there should be an option there to disable your onboard graphics chip completely.