This is a common issue and can easily be solved by following the steps below. Start at 1, if that does not work, try 2, if these both do not work try 3.
- Please make sure to update your drivers. If you are running on a laptop it is quite common that the laptop has two graphics card. In some cases the drivers fails to determine the correct card to be used and ends up using the one with low performance.
Please make sure that you set your settings (check your graphics control panel) to use the graphics card with the best performance. - Sometimes it helps to remove your entire settings.txt after updating drivers/changing to use of the correct graphics card.
- Navigate to and open "Documents\Paradox Interactive\Europa Universalis IV\settings.txt"
Change "force_pow2_textures=" to yes or no.