I had been running my Radeon Card (5970) with default setting for a year now, with the newwer stuff that been released my frames rate had been dropping into the mid 30s, with mome heavy action periods requing me to turn lots of stuff off to get my Frame rate back. At one point last week I had shut off deatailed terrain just to get mack into the 40s. after reading through this thread I went and tried a few thing and here is what I found.
Morfilogical filtering
- set to OFF
AA has two paramerters:
- Pixels set to 2X
- AA mode (Wide Tent) 4X
Tessalation
- Set to Off
...and to make this short, I turned everything else off.
The only thing that affected graphics quality was the Anti Aliasing setting, and setting them higher than the first two settings did not make inprove the look of the game, but did has an effect on Text fonts. They did however have a big effect on Frame rate. After I did this I turned on....
2048 textures
Bump map My plane with 1 notch of "New features" (this added the reflections to the glass surfaces)
Detailed terrain set to 4 mile range
Self shadows set to 4096
Detailed water (with local water reflections)
Bump map terrain
Bump map clouds
Running and holding 50-60 FPS. Game looks great. still getting some micro studdering with track IR...
I played a little with the AA mode (Edge detect versus, Narrow tent, versus wide tent...trying to see which had a bigger impact on image quality and frame rate. I found the wide tent and the 2X samples looked just fine and the other setting weren't worth the fps hit. but I was still getting some micro-studdering from timeto time and holding 50-60
so I started the game at the first screen, then started the Task manager. I went to the process screen and shut off all the other useless stuff, and set AH t priority yo HIGH, as well as the TrackIR to HIGH. I then set everything else to low. (windows7) Now the games runs at a stead 60 FPS and the studdering is gone.
I thik there are a lot of these features in the Graphics card that are of no use in AH. Leaving them turned on makes the card do a lot of calculations that dan't add anything but they do use up GC resources and slow you down. Shut them all off except Anti aliasing, and there seems to be no need to over do that either.
I can't run 8192 shadows because it reeally eats frames vs 4096. I go from 60 to 35-40 with the shadows at the highest resolution. I think changing the priority allows more CPU resouces to be focused on AH and that made a big difference. I'm going to try one for the resources tracking programs to see if the CPU and the GPU are beingutilized in a balanced way. I suspect my CPU (2.66 Quad core Duo) is the bottle neck for further improvements. I also tested the slider bar for the "New eycandy" aby moving it to the left. 25% moved up to 75% was worth about 10-15 frames, but I couldn't tell what in came was changing. So to me it wasn't worth it. Of course it my be for something I didn't come across.
OK hope that is value to someone. 
Update....
Ok this is going to sound like it makes no sense...because it doesn't.
I wanted to see what my "utilization" was to determine where the weak spot in my system was so I downloaded AMD System Monitor and installed. Started it up and hit the record button. Took and flew a combat sortie, where I ran into multiple bandits, with same settings as above. Ran around 57-60 FPS. went tot he file opened it and checked the data.
CPU 1 90%-100%
CPU 2 5%
CPU 3 8%
CPU 4 20%
GPU 1 20% with clock speed fixed @ 725 (which is the Overdrive setting., same with mem speed @1000)
GPU 2 5% with clock speed fixed @ 725 (which is the Overdrive setting., same with mem speed @1000)
GPU fan speed fixed at 4100 (is that supposed to be 410 RPM?)
Temps running 38C-40C for both GPUs
The GPUs were running at Zero% with an ocasional blip up to 20% on one GPU.
I thought that the CPU must be bogged down, but thought it strange that tthe other cores would be utilized more to alivieate the bottleneck. Then I though, why am I running "Overdrive" if the GPUs aren;t being taxed at all. So I went to the AMD Catalyst window, went to the Overdrive and disabled it. My plan was to go back to game and take more datat and see if the GPUs would be "utilized" more, thinking utilization must be calculated on total capability. If I slowed the GPU down, the same workload would require hiher utilization.
Back in game, same field, same plane, take off and meet the same bandits. FPS pegged at 60. To add more data condintiones to the test I go the advanced graphics and turn the "self shadows" up to 8192.
Game pegs at 60 FPS.
Fly the whole sorty, I think at one point it dropped to 57 FPS.
I go back and check the sys monitor recording and now I see something that looks like this...
CPU 1 80%
CPU 2 40%
CPU 3 40%
CPU 4 30%
GPU 1 80% with clock speed Varying between 157Mhz @ 725Mhz (which is the Overdrive setting., same with mem speed @1000)
GPU 2 40% with clock speed Varying between 157Mhz @ 725Mhz (which is the Overdrive setting., same with mem speed @1000)
GPU fan speed fixed at 1700-1800.
Temps climbed from 60C to 80C (held there) for both GPUs
Game looked positively beautiful with those crisp 8192 shows rolling around my P-39 cockpit. I get woried about temps, but don't what's too high.
But clearly the take away for me is that my rig utilized all resources better with overclocking via "Overdrive" turned off. When I get home tonight I will make graphs of the data and post it.
I'm happy but confused.
