Hi, I apologize for creating a yet another FPS thread but I could not find a solution in other threads that I read. I want to be brief:

Problem: In 25 man raids and battlegrounds, my FPS drops dramatically. First to about 3-4 FPS and then the whole application freezes for up to a whole minute. Then it comes back, if I'm lucky to 5-6 FPS before it freezes again in another minute or so. Freezes occur right before cinematics load in Dragon Soul as well as during encounters. Happens in all 25 man environments including Baradin Hold and battlegrounds. It's totally unplayable.

There were no such problems prior to Cataclysm, I remember doing Alterac Valley or raiding ICC on my other toons just fine, 10m or 25m, never worrying about FPS. The only FPS issue would be the occasional Saturday evening in Dalaran, but that was fine. Battlegrounds and raids were okay.

What I have done so far: I have long ago set all the graphics options to the lowest (except view distance to second lowest and projected textures is still enabled). I have tried updating graphics drivers in both Windows x86 and 64bit. I defragmented my hard drive, I have tried running the game with no applications running in the background. I have tried both Directx9 and 11 (also tried adding the -d3d11 command to the shortcut, which solved some people's issues). I lowered the resolution from 1920 to 1280, even 1024. I tried enabling/disabling "triple buffering" and "reduce input lag". Nothing helps. I should also add, when the game freezes for a minute, task manager suggests both CPU and RAM usage is at about 60%. Also doesn't really make a difference if I have a 10 tab Chrome window open in the background, it's still the same poor performance. I also tried running without addons (which use max 30 MBs of memory.)

I would very much like your help about this. I had been waiting to kill Deathwing for a long time, and reading the paper as I wait for the game to unfreeze and then looting the boss once it's killed isn't really fun.

System Information:
Pentium 2.6 Dual Core
4 GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 4800 graphics card
Windows 7 32 bit

Thanks.