Reposting from the performance thread.
Did some testing. Gonna echo others: the "Effects Quality" setting has the most significant hit on performance than any other, the framerate difference between High and Ultra fucking huge. The effect seems to handle, surprise surprise, "effects" like particle effects (smoke/fire/sparks/etc), though I don't think include stuff like dof/bokeh/blur.
Without a doubt the best place to test this is the second campaign level, early on when you're looking out over the Shanghai hotel courtyard before infiltration. As most people will have experienced, framerate tanks in this area. However, with fraps running I noticed it wasn't constant; it fluctuates. The reason? The fucking water jets. When they're spraying, down goes the framerate. When they're not, the framerate soars right back up.
Here's an example of the difference in that area while the water is spraying. All other settings on "Ultra", post-AA off, MSAAx4, 1920x1080:
"Effects Quality" set to "Ultra": ~27fps
"Effects Quality" set to "High": ~52fps
That's a cost of ~25fps for one setting during intense particles.
What I'd like to know is what hardware the "Effects Quality" setting is dependant on: GPU or CPU. Transparencies and what not might fall back on the CPU. I'd also like to know what's going on with the technology between "High" and "Ultra". Density maybe, or how the particle responds to lighting and shadows. It's hard to spot a visual difference to be perfectly honest, but it would be interesting to learn what changes are made to particle rendering between those two settings.
In hindsight this explains a way a lot of my framerate dips from the beta, specifically when the tower collapsed and was spitting out particles, and when I died while in a tank and the kill cam highlighted my opponent through my smoking/burning remains. I was running everything on ultra at the time.
So yeah. If you're finding framerate dips during really intense stuff that involves particle effects (explosions, fire, smoke, dust kicked up by helicopters, etc), drop it down from Ultra to High and enjoy the tremendous framerate increase.
