another performance thread

[CWMV]

That's not quite correct.
There are many of us very happy with our "insufficient" 1.5gb GTX580's, lol!
Personally, I almost never drop below an average of 55fps during online play.
OP there are more than a few options that will suit you well, but its all about budget! The more you have to spend, the better the game will play.
I know several guts that have excellent performance with gtx570's, and of course any 580.

[coolts]

Yep, your card is the weak point there. I’ve got an i7 930, 6gb RAM & a 580 1.5gb and the game is GPU bound and I got poor performance so that I’ve had to drop the resolution down way below my monitors native resolution (2560x1440).
Test this for yourself;

With the game running, on a 2nd monitor, run task manager in the performance tab to see if your cores / Ram are being hammered by the game, (won’t happen with your specs).

Also download and install “MSI Afterburner” and run it. Set monitors for “GPU usage” & “GPU RAM usage” & “FPS” and I absolutely guarantee you will be flat lining 100% in the GPU usage and the game will have gobbled up all your GFX card RAM and will therefore be hammering your hard disk page file.

Engine optimisations are sorely needed but probably won’t happen much till the bigger issues are fixed. In the meantime drop your resolution, (and AA, AF), and texture quality and re-check the graphs. Tweak till you have a good frame rate. Like ARMAII, it’s a trade-off.

Sheer resolutuion is one of the biggest killers with big monitors. My native res needs (2560x1440 =), 3,686,400 pixels pumping out for each frame, whereas when I dropped down to 1920 x 1080 my GFX card ‘only’ has to produce 2,073,600 pixels per frame. That’s a drop of 77% in pixels, and my performance still wasn’t super smooth so I had to cut more corners. Such is life.

With your card, drop the rez first. Find a resolution on this list that is the same ratio as your monitors native rez (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution), and re-test on medium settings (grass off BTW), and drop again till you are smooth. Then you can start re-adding the eye candy till you get a comfy balance.

It can be done.