Ive just spent a fortune, to play this very game ? Am i not allowed to be annoyed ?!
nope.
you spent a fortune, and can play the game. you don't know you can't play at top settings yet, and even if you can't you aren't far off.
fear, soft shadows, killed performance few cards gave good performance on release with soft shadows enabled, very few people liked the effect and most played without it on because it ran better AND looked better.
have you played with every setting, do you know for a fact that new drivers before the release of full game won't up performane a lot? do you know that if you drop one setting, that might make almost no difference to IQ performance will increase loads?
does the game not look better than anything else around on high settings anyway?
you could be annoyed if high settings ran at 10fps, and it looked worse than HL2. it doesn't, it looks massively massively better than HL2, and ep 1, ep 2 and it takes more power to do so.