When things are moving and shooting back at you, the game gets badly bottlenecked by GHz on the last CPU core, where "ca_thread0Affinity" and "r_WaterUpdateThread" both reside.
This is
bad, as the game seems to rely on thread0 and not use thread1 much, so having waterupdate on the same core gums up the works.
There's also this "sys_budget_soundCPU" line, which when left at default tries to reserve 15% of any given core from any given thread (thus a dual-core can be redlined, but changes to this string makes a difference.) Changing this line to something smaller helps a little, but not as much as one would hope: You may as well set it to zero and do some tests with flamers.
I must point out DDR3-1333 was last considered optimal for Good Ol' Nehalem: Re-buying ones' RAM blows chunks, but you'll want to
look into it.
Edited by Goose, 16 May 2014 - 01:43 PM.