I was a release day CD player, and honestly while yeah the game had trouble areas, like large scale battles and dips when it rains, fog, ect, other then that it ran pretty well regardless of quality or performance mode. Quality mode, which was my preferred mode, was always generally really stable outside of being near water or rain, which would drop fps or so by maybe 1 or 2, but I'm one of the types that if given the choice I prefer a steady 30 rather then a jumpy 60 where framerates are constantly going from 60, to mid 50s ect, but even performance mode rarely dipped under the 50s.
I jumped back into it because I haven't played since they released "enhanced", which adds more depth to the story, so I started a new game. Immediately the opening area in quality mode was already constantly dipping. That entire battle sequence was at around 25 fps, which earlier, even after they added pssr2 in the quality mode, would still hold between 30 with an occasional dip.
The horse ride afterwards from the lake to the town was also choppy with dips, which again didn't happen before. The northern area outside hernand is also very dippy now, while the weird part is in the actual city itself with all the NPCs, which used to dip to like 29 28 fps in the past in the big crowd areas is now actually performing better and holding 30 lol. It's the outside foliage areas that are now the issue which weren't an issue before.
I posted a topic on the CD subreddit but trying to get an unbiased opinion there is hard. They are very defensive there in general over this game, telling me it's my console or I need to get a PC, only a few people chimed in with actual useful info. A few people actually think they made the game perform better on base consoles, but somehow fucked over the pro version in the process, so now the base consoles actually have a smoother running version then we do.
Any of you here that play or have played CD recently can chime in here? Is it possibly my console? Or did they just fuck up the game? My console runs other games just fine, i not had any crashes, overheat warnings, and I deep clean my pro every 6 months. Its almost 2 years old.