Hey everyone!
I've been plagued with this issue as well, only getting 5 FPS while connected to the internet and 144 FPS when disconnected. Fortunately, I found another solution that worked perfectly for me, should updating your network adapter drivers not work.
For clarity, I'm on Windows 10 running the latest 2004 update / Build19041 and utilizing the Steam platform.
The Fix:
- Win + S
- Search for "Internet Options" and open it
- Under "General > Browsing history" click "Settings"
- Under the "Temporary Internet Files" tab, ensure you have some disk space allocated. I somehow had 0MB allocated which was the root cause for my low framerate (more on that under "Discovery".) Following the recommended amount to allocate is fine.
- As another precaution, click the "Caches and databases" tab and delete any cache files, if applicable.
Here's what my internet option settings look like afterwards:
Discovery:
After days of annoying troubleshooting, I came to this solution after noticing extremely abnormal high disk usage when running TS4 and thinking that might have to do with our low framerate issue. In Task Manager I saw that "Host Process for Windows Tasks" was using nearly 100% of my C: drive (where I have everything installed) whenever the game was running. "But Vivid, the game has so many assets to load, especially if you have CC and expansions!!" Well yes, Jimmy, but your disk usage shouldn't be permanently stuck at 100% usage when playing the game. So, I decided to explore further with Process Explorer and noticed that there was an excessive amount of writing being done to a WebCacheV01 data file in Windows' temp folder only when the game was running.
I'm talking like non-stop refreshing with activity in the modules list which was not exactly normal behavior, especially with no major web services running asides from Steam and Origin. With that newfound knowledge, I looked around a bit and saw that some Windows users in general had high disk usage due to that WebCacheV01.dat file and that such issues can be mitigated through tinkering with your internet options in the control panel. I noticed mine was set to 0MB somehow, as mentioned above; you can't enter a value less than 8MB so I'm at a loss there, but after allocating a few hundred megabytes I saw my frames in-game instantly jump from 5 fps to my native 144 fps. I'm assuming that there may be some serious communication going on between the game executable and the servers for analytics or anti-piracy, or whatever it may be, and having insufficient cache allocated for internet files just kills your performance with all the attempted writing being done. I'm not too versed on how most of that works, but all I know is the issue at hand is fixed.
Hopefully this helps out the rest of you affected by this issue!