Realize I didn't include a whole bunch of information in my first post, so my bad!
I did end up finding a program that worked for me because (here's the kicker) I'm on a mac and running this through Wine/PlayOnMac.
What made me think it wasn't using the right graphics card was, as you guessed, low fps. Got that all sorted and I'm having a blast! REALLY wish I could play with bloom and high shaders but 20-30fps just doesn't work for me. I can keep everything else at high and turn shadows off, bloom off, AA to medium and it runs quite a bit smoother so I'll roll with that. Thank you for the replies!