For all of you using junk onboard sound. Get a clue, this is your first problem. Onboard sound sucks, causes nothing but issues in games and should be freaken banned from PC gaming. Take $50 bucks and buy a decent sound card. This is not rocket science people! Second issue is turn off FSAA settings. Turn it off. Not low or medium. Turn it bloody off!! It takes away your performance period! It dosen't make the game look better. Go see a doctor if you have some obsession with a jaggie on a straight line. There is medication for obsessive disorders like this. Jesus, everytime I read some bone-head crying about performance the first thing I see is they are using FSAA. It is stupid, not needed and all you are doing is taking away frames per second not adding to it. A small jaggie on a straight line dosen't make the game any different!
I would suggest testing with sound disabled first to see if that has any improvement on fps, it didn't in my case.
Nor does turning FSAA to high, med, low or off. There is simply another issue at work here.
FPS is patchy, sometimes it's up around the 80fps, others it's around the 30fps, but it never really feels smooth.
I have a Q8400 and all cpu cores are showing at < 50% so it's not CPU limited and at the same time my 5870 GPU is showing at < 30% utilised. I'm running everything on High @ 1680x1050. Dropping the Detail even to everything on low, does not improve the FPS or really change the CPU / GPU utilisation.
The Training levels feel great, the Range at the start and also the 1st mission where you get to order your squad about is like butter (but they are simple maps), but as soon as you get onto one of the game maps (Station for example), it's ~30fps and stuttery. But as mentioned CPU and GPU are not maxed in any sense.
I suspect there is another bottleneck? Shifting that much data around the System bus? which is holding up the CPU and thus GPU.
Ramm's point about the level size + complexity and needing optimisation is backedup by what I'm seeing I think?!
Everyone is busy thinking of the performance in raw CPU Core + GPU utilisation but systems / software are much more complex than this.
The fact you can run the same game engine in the training levels and it be buttery (which is the same engine as the rest of the game) show's that it's down to map optimisation and a bottleneck in the system / software that's stopping the CPU & GPU from being able to operate properly.
I'm simplifying & speculating here of course.
Are the Dev's able to give us a really simple Map big open field with craters and the odd fence in to test with? Perhaps make the 1st Squad training map available for simple FireFight multiplayer? This might show to users that it's map complexity that's causing this (or not).
