Onus :
Hmmm, I got this game free with a 500GB Samsung 840 EVO. It will be the first shooter I've tried in years. I'm thinking my i5-3570K and HD7970 ought to manage "very high" reasonably well.
i run a 280X that is factory clocked to a ghz edition level.
i run the game with everything maxed but the fur sim and the AO, for ao, set it to the lowest one available, they fixed the really crappy implementation from far cry 3 that gave everything a black outline, and the difference between the lowest setting and the highest is visually negligible while you will notice a LARGE jump in framerate...
though i cant figure out whats up with the random LARGE fps dips, im assumeing it has to do withloading areas apposed to it being just a graphics problem...
now that i see the very high and ultra comparison. im going to find out what makes that blue haze and kill it, i think very high overall looks better than ultra because of that.
-- update --
turn off alpha to coverage in the game xml file, it costs a stupid amount of processing power for something you have to magnify to see
i also turned off tree relief because it takes a stupid amount of processing power for not much visual benefit and i just knocked down the geometry level to low because in all honesty i play on the ground more often than i go in the air, and it culls trees so far out i don't notice it at all unless i specifically look for it.
also personal preference, i turned shadows to either high or very high... i dont like soft shadows much, and the performance hit for them isnt worth it, i had originally though that anything lower than ultra lowered the shadow map and made it look blocky but i was wrong. with the power i saved, i turned hbao+ on because i saw that this game handles some areas stupidly where the only way to see detail with with the ssao... i wish games would stop doing this and just bake ao on anything that doesn't move and save me the processing power so i can turn the crap low of off completely.
you also may want to turn water effects to low instead of ultra... the difference is negligible at best, but same with performance gains.
sadly no way for me to get fps works so yay...