my brother had the same problem as you after the Darius patch. Darius was the graphics update, right?
He said he solved the problem by updating his drivers, putting everything on the lowest settings, and then configuring his machine to use really old visual settings so that it looks like he's running Windows 95, and now he gets it only a little worse than before the patch
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http://img.imgcake.com/McBones/MvC3politicalupdatejpgyt.jpg