Jhelle

I am having this exact same problem and I have windows xp with a ATI card too (4850HD). The first 2 areas were playable although getting into the menu to save took like 40 sec. But once I got to the first village my FPS took a major hit and went to like 2 fps which is unplayable. I tried a virtual machine with window 98 but after installing I noticed steam doesn't support 98 . Then tried windows xp on a virtual machine, steam and geneforge installed but the mouse sensitivity had major bugs ingame which caused it to be unplayable. Then I noticed all of you got ati cards too so I went into my device manager and DISABLED my video card ( luckily my motherboard has some standard video card in it). I rebooted and the game ran like it is supposed to. I really hope Jeff can fix the ati card issues cause I don't like disabling my video card each time to play ! So for everyone where the game doesnt work well you should try this atleast to see if it is really the card or just me.