[Zebodog]

I think there's a couple of issue happening here:

1. ATI's horrible OpenGL support. I couldn't play NWN period with my 9600XT (which had more than enough power) until I switched to a 9800pro.

2. There is a coding error in SoU, that causes massive frame rate hits in certain errors. I thought the latest patch had fixed that though, but apparantly not.

As has been suggested previously, try different camera angles and zoom levels. Just by switching from driving to top down camera can provide as much as 15fps (in my experiments)

Also, you could try different versions of Catalyst. I've heard many people have had a lot of success by extracting the opengl.dll (?) from older catalysts and putting it in the root directory of the game, thus forcing the game to use that version of OpenGL. Check around and see what success other people have had.