Smoke from burning buildings

[Babalonian]

The smoke in AH doesn't look very realistic at all, and making it larger just makes it look daft.

Depends how large, as Fish demonstrated, a little larger looks MUCH better imho, but much larger looks ugly, "daft" and unrealistic.  I think the current way it is though would fit the bill for "daft" nicely.

[Babalonian]

also it would crush computers that are already on the edge of playability.

*puff*   

IE: those awesome clouds over TT that we, the burdened majority who have upgraded or reinvested in PC hardware and software, never get to see utilised.

[Dragon Tamer]

First I will say that about 2 or 3 years ago the computer received a new graphics card for the sake of running Assassin's Creed. It was just barely able to run that at minimum graphics settings. And don't bother asking what type of card it is, I don't know off the top of my head and i'm not cracking open the computer just to find out.

I matched the OP's arena changes on my own and tested this on my very crappy 7 year old computer. It's worth noting that my computer was having an odd night... I was playing with the terrain detail on, detailed water, local water reflections, plane bump mapping on with the environment slider set to the first notch (the second will crash it every time), and the self shadow set to 512 and I was still holding an average frame rate of 30 (it'll hold 60 with it everything off). Now when I went into a custom arena and matched the OP's settings, I was able to get 45 frames... then I flew through the smoke and it took a nose dive to 10 frames. I turned everything off and was still only able to squeeze 21 frames. As soon as I came out of the smoke the frame rate would return to a normal level.

So yes to answer the question, a low end computer cannot handle this kind of smoke.