When I was playing windowed mode, 1024x768 with lowest settings, my graphics card usage was 12% for the 10 seconds the game ran fine, and during the 2 second frame lag spike, the usage went down to 1%-0%. When I played it in windowed mode, I noticed my graphics card usage. After I started getting the frame lag spike, I tried playing Saint's Row The Third at 1024x768 with the lowest settings, and I still had the same issue. I've played Skyrim and Crysis 2 at 1600x900 with Medium settings and had playable frame rates even with lots of explosions and flashes going around on the screen. So I'm not really sure if it's a hardware issue. Now while the system is in no way a graphics guzzling beast, I make do with most games running at 1600x900 with Medium to High graphics while getting a decent and playable 40-50 fps. Something else that really helped before I upgraded my system to one that was finally able to smoothly run the game was to turn all graphics settings to their minimum values - for some reason, effect like HDR and high detail textures are very laggy on SR2 PC.
VIA Vinyl Audio Deck with codec version VT1708S SR2 is just a horrible PC port, but that link really helped my performance. NVidia GeForce 9500 GT graphics card running at 550 MHz/400 MHz DLCs are already readily available for it (such as the Money Shot DLC).
It’s available on Windows XP / Vista / Windows 7 PCs, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles. I have tried most of the fixes generally applicable to such problems, running in windowed mode, running on a lower resolution with lower effects, running as administrator, reinstalling. Last Updated on Monday, 29 December 2014 10:52 Written by DarkKnightH20 Tuesday, 15 November 2011 11:26 It’s finally out Saints Row: The 3rd You can even get it on Steam. The problem is, whenever I start the game, it runs fine for 10 seconds, then I get a frame lag spike for 2 seconds, then it goes smooth for 10 seconds, then the frame lag spike again, and so on. I recently installed Saint's Row The Third on my PC.