Hello Chad,
I was also affected by the 9/9 patch and saw my game sink to 5 FPS. This last patch however fixed it and I am back to 35 FPS, thank you. I tried the -nosound option just for curiosity’s sake and it did not alter my current FPS rate.
I have a very solid video card and 8G of RAM but my CPU is a C2D so, my high res texture option was indeed greyed out. My rig runs Skyrim with high-res textures and other rather new games with full graphical options cranked up, no problem but I do know that some games depend more on the CPU than they do on the GPU; SWTOR was infamous for that. Since I’m not very good with noticing graphical differences, I can’t really say if the game looks better or worse than it did before 9/9 but I can say this: it runs smooth once more.
Thank you!!