In the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system, the nonlinear distortion in the high power amplifier(HPA) degrades the system performance because of the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). In this paper, a semi-analytical method is newly proposed for the performance evaluation of the nonlinearly distorted OFDM communication system. In the proposed method, at first, the probability density function (pdf) of the PAPR is generated by computer simulation. Then, mean and variance of the non-linear distortion noise process are computed. Next, the overall BER is found by the analytical method. When the equivalent SSPA model is applied in case of the QPSK/16-QAM and AWGN channel, the BER is calculated for the variation of the IBO(input back-off) and PAPR parameter. It is shown that the results by proposed method are very similar to those of the conventional Monte-Carlo method. The computation time can be considerably reduced than the conventional method that depends on the magnitudes of BER and IBO.