The patch greatly improved performance for me and I run a i7 900 series chip and use an ati 5000 vid card. My specs are as follows:

chip 920 @ 4.0Ghz

Vid card: 5850 with Cats 11.3

In game res.

1920x1200 @60mhz

All set to high with SSAO disabled (unchecked)

buildings number set to medium
textures set to high

I get over london on average 35fps and no stutters.. over sea and unpopulated land my fps go up in the 50's and 60's

I have your system. You will be happy ;). Only thing I turn off is shadows. I don't use FSAS either since it doesn't seem to make a difference. Game runs great. Only issues I've had, if I change certain Video settings that require a restart of the game the launcher stop and I need to close and restart game manually.

XFX ATI Radeon 6970 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express 2morrow
waited in all day for it to turn up, now its not coming till 2morrow :(
Overclocker.uk you disapoint me :)
regards
Doc

I did copy your specs m8, when i built this :)
regards
Doc

You won't be disappointed.

Same here. I have i7 920 3ghz and Radeon 6970 (that I just bought last week), and I get average 18fps over London (when flying over rooftops) on medium to high settings on 1920 resolution. I am quite disappointed on the performance.

I have an I7 950, 12 x1600 Ram, and a GTX285 and I didn't notice much of a difference from the beta patch to the April 18 official patch.

I am using 1920x1080 Everything High except Low on the trees, no grass, medium on buildings, and no roads. I am probably going to turn roads back on. Because i really don't see a big difference in speed. I get 50+ FPS at high altitude and dip into the high teens about 1000ft or lower.

the only time I notice a very slow rate is at extremely low altitude (500ft) or less. I haven't been around the big cities yet, but I am guessing that the bottleneck isn't the Graphics Card.

It seems to me that the ammount of objects that the CPU has to account for bog it down pretty hard. The only reason I make this assumption is how much of a difference online play makes to FPS. I think once they balance out and optimize core usage the game will be much more playable on multi-core machines. For me speed really is a non-issue though.

At the moment im using 2 9600 gso's
But its only using one of them, because of sli not working.
But that one card, is performing better than i expected :) i would hate to think what it would run like if i had both cards working in sli :)
regards
Doc

I get an average of 54 flying around in the Spitfire over London Quick Mission at 1920X1200 High Settings.. SSAO Unchecked, Shadows OFF AA Off (in game GUI)

From what I've gathered thus far from tweaking the settings to get the best performance is that by just turning shadows off in the GUI is like giving this sim steroids. It really boosts framerate. I kinda love the look of dynamic shadows in the pit so i keep it on, but if you want to boost your frames just uncheck shadows.