Why so intensive?

I have searched on both these forums and on the Official City of Heroes forums for explainations on why that game (City of Heroes, MMO, Original release 2004) is so damn hard to max things out on. Maybe someone with some technical background can explain to me why an older game like that (I understand it has been updated since then... but still) takes so much to run.

On my R1 if I set the settings to "performance", no FSAA, no shadows, no reflections, I still only get 26-30 FPS. Which I admit for an MMO is definatly playable... but damnit I want it to look pretty, and "performance" is not pretty. I don't understand why my R1 can't run it on max settings. Could it be their crappy engine?

I played it before on my GTX 260 in my desktop and it runs fine. 40-50 FPS on Ultra settings. Is it too CPU intensive? I have posted both on the official City of heroes forums to no avail. It is free to play now, if anyone wants to test it out to see what I am talking about... maybe some other users could yield better results? Its a great game, I can deal with performance... I was just hoping for some clarification. Figured if any community could tell me, this one could.

 

Could be just poor optimization game-wise. I get like 30FPS in runescape with 540M ... Some developers just don't bother with optimization it seems, or the game engine sux.

Were you playing on a near clean install? otherwise it could be just background processes clogging it up or something. after 2months use Race driver: GRID is getting way more frame drops etc. than it used on a clean windows. Just sayin'

 

Yea it's a clean install. Just got my R1