This is going to sound stupid, but.....

[Twelvepak1]

When I first played the game on the 15th, my fps was horrible, especially in Exhaustless Mines, and in stations. Whenever I get a new game, I max out every setting possible and work my way back to hit the sweetspot. With this game, I ended up with the absolute lowest settings on EVERYTHING, and that's how I've been playing up till today.

Just for the heck of it, I upped the resolution to 1440 x 900, turned AA on to 4x, turned the LOD back on, (only up to 10), upped the view distance and effect distance back up to 50, (been on 25 since launch day), left shadows off, and left shaders on High. I have no idea why, but the increase in performance after turning these settings back up was astounding. It is so much better than at absolute bottom settings. Guess they got something right in one of those patches in there somewhere. I wasn't running Fraps, so I don't know how much the increase was, but it was significant enough that my enjoyment of the game just doubled.

My system is only a mid-range system at best. I've go an FX-8150, a GTX 560, 8 gigs of ram, on a Gigabyte UD3 motherboard. I also have the V-Sync disabled via the Nvidia control panel. If you've a similar system, I would highly recommend trying this if you haven't tried it since launch day.

[Engriffi]

"This is going to sound stupid, but....."

Not at all. Playing around with display settings to find a particular system setup's 'sweet spot' is good advice for anyone.

[SupraRZ]

Enable adaptive v-sync (half refresh rate) in Nvidia control panel it will max 30fps but smooooooth as a baby's botty
I7@4.2 gtx680

[pirke123]

I run everything at MAX since day 1 (1920x1200), including view distance, vsync, etc. No performance issues whatsoever.

2x 580gtx (yes, the second does get used 20-40%)

I think the biggest reason is: quad core i5 @ 4,5ghz. As this game is very CPU intensive, you can tweak video settings what you want, your CPU will bottleneck. Running 4 cores at 4,5ghz seems to be sufficient

[Loran_69]

I run everything at MAX since day 1 (1920x1200), including view distance, vsync, etc. No performance issues whatsoever.

2x 580gtx (yes, the second does get used 20-40%)

I think the biggest reason is: quad core i5 @ 4,5ghz. As this game is very CPU intensive, you can tweak video settings what you want, your CPU will bottleneck. Running 4 cores at 4,5ghz seems to be sufficient

My i7 3770K OC 4,4ghz, so 4 physical cores at 4.4ghz (+ 4 virtuals) are not enough for me with my GTX670 (OC too). My fps go from 2 fps to 45fps with average 17/18 which is barely playable... Sometimes it raise to 45/50fps, even on heavy scenes, and can go to 2fps on empty space, which definitively show real performance bug(s) somewhere...When monitored my CPUs show they are far from be heavily used by the game, and GPU also is far from busy. Lot of room for improvement for both

[ziporama]

I run everything at MAX since day 1 (1920x1200), including view distance, vsync, etc. No performance issues whatsoever.

2x 580gtx (yes, the second does get used 20-40%)

I think the biggest reason is: quad core i5 @ 4,5ghz. As this game is very CPU intensive, you can tweak video settings what you want, your CPU will bottleneck. Running 4 cores at 4,5ghz seems to be sufficient

My i7 3770K OC 4,4ghz, so 4 physical cores at 4.4ghz (+ 4 virtuals) are not enough for me with my GTX670 (OC too). My fps go from 2 fps to 45fps with average 17/18 which is barely playable... Sometimes it raise to 45/50fps, even on heavy scenes, and can go to 2fps on empty space, which definitively show real performance bug(s) somewhere...When monitored my CPUs show they are far from be heavily used by the game, and GPU also is far from busy. Lot of room for improvement for both

My 3770K is at 4.65GHz, so very similar to your rigs it seems - except I have an ATI 7970 instead of your Nvidia. I am getting 28 FPS rock bottom, usually hovers around 34+ FPS at full HD resolution, although I am forcing SMAA medium quality through RadeonPro as well as disable GPU power stepping. Also, this is on Windows 8.1 x64. Cores 1 and 2 are pretty much maxed out, 3 and 4 all over the place, and GPU utilization goes usually between 83 and 99% according to MSI Afterburner. The GPU utilization varies greatly depending where you are and which way you're facing but it's pretty smooth here.

Z.