I don't know if it's lower FPS but anything higher than 30 is good enough for me and i do use Vsync, so i don't have any use for more than 60FPS because i have a 60Hz IPS monitor.

In that sense i prefer having 40 FPS with more consistency than having 60 FPS that dips into the low 20s. Think about it, if the FPS are limited somewhat on purpose the PC has more time to render what it needs to display and this helps maintain a more constant frame rate.
This has been a very often used tweak for FSX as well.

Well, in the current beta patch that's exactly what seems to be happening, most people report lower FPS but more smoothness.

In other words, losing 5-10 FPS is only a big deal when that drop results in your minimums getting below the human eye's comfort zone. If you have 50 FPS pre-patch and 40 post-patch it's no big deal, especially if post-patch is steadier.

And if that drop gets you below 25-30 FPS there is a very easy fix with minimal loss of visual quality: drop your texture resolution one notch, it's the graphics setting with the most impact on FPS. ;-)

Yes, blackdog's post highlights what I said in OP about the minimum figure being the most important. The drop from 90 to 80 in my case is immaterial but if you were borderline before (say 45) then this patch could hurt a bit. It will be interesting to see what happens with the release version.

Personally I can't understand how people can play without vsync anyway. I get really bad tearing when it is disabled but maybe that is a gtx 480 problem?

And Land Detail! These two settings are the "Holly Grail" of tweaks to run CloD fluid without losing much visual quality! :grin:

I believe what blackdog said is happening to me as well and I agree with him absolutely.

Looking at the earlier shots with 2xAA, it looks like that for me too, however if I use only 1xAA the game looks a lot better (going to post shots if I can), in external view I pretty much cannot see any jaggies when looking at the side of the plane (same position as the earlier screenshots).

I am under the impression that forcing vsync on in the nvidia cp gives better performance than the ingame vsync.

Running 270.xx whql driver, after using the latest whql driver, I like this one better, my card does seem to have problems with the latest driver even in win7 desktop environment. I read in another game dev's forum that the whql driver after the 270 is nvidia's new "safe standard" (so 270.xx whql is their last "risky" perfromance driver?) and people in that forum were advised to use 270.xx for their game due to issues with the newer drivers. The other game I am referring to is DragonAge 2 btw.

Oh, and one other thought.

I did play around with overclocking my graphics card and processor, just won't keep up the processor overclocking until I get a decent after market cooler.
Please correct me if I am wrong, like to hear your thoughts on this. It seemed graphics card overclocking didn't really do anything much for me in terms of fps, however with an overclocked processor the game seemed to run much, much better.
I am happy with the perfromance on stock speeds, so like I said no need to push it without proper cooling.
Could it be that the game reacts very positively to processor speeds, you know how some games are more gpu sensitive and some cpu sensitive, which one cannot necessarily tell from the graphical appearance of the game?

Turn AA off, then fly say.. a Hurricane, and look at, for instance, the metal frame around the gunsight. Now turn it back on and look again. There is a clear and obvious difference in pixelation.

The difference has also been shown externally in screenshots in this very thread. Yes there are areas where it is not working as well as it could, but it is certainly working to some extent and always has.

Here are a couple of pics with only 1xAA (for me it works better than 2xAA or up). As I said the 2xAA looks for me the same as the pics earlier in the post and I cannot see a difference between 2xAA and 16xAA.
So yes it still needs some fixing but it is just plain wrong to say it doesn't work at all.

Land shading and clouds are another 2 you can add to the list. Big hit from both of these.

This latest update cost me about 10% in terms of performance, which seems to be in line with what many have reported. Out of interest, I increased my base clock rate by the same amount, and gained the loss straight back again. This is somewhat unusual, as rarely does an overclock produce an equivalent gain in performance – it’s usually less. I tested this a couple of times using the Black Death track as a benchmark, with the same result.

I tried raising the multiplier to 20 on my previous mobo with a much lower increase in frame rates (my previous DDR-II 1066 RAM didn’t have much headroom), but my current DDR-III 1333 RAM runs happily at 1500MHz with a base clock of 224MHz (cpu at 3.80GHz) with no voltage adjustments on either the cpu or memory. For cooling I am using a CoolerMaster Hyper 212, which keeps the cpu temp down to around 52˚C under load (ambient around 26 ˚C when I tested).

It seems that this latest update has placed more load on the system rather than the graphics card, as increasing my card’s clocks produces a negligible increase in frame rates. Roll on Bulldozer and DDR-III 1866 memory :)

I've been running the Black Death-track and notice a 10% performance hit as well. I have to mention though: disabling the logo.wmv really does make a difference on my machine. I ran the Black Death-track with and without it. By disabling it I gained no less than 10 FPS.