Here you go mate... these are low settings and you can see what it looks like, along with the framerate in fraps.
As you can see, the fps can go into the 20s especially at night. That's on a Q6600, 4GB DDR2-1066 and 9600GT.
Why are you running on such poor optimized settings ?
You can easily up the textures to medium, it will barely make any difference to performance. Detail distance can be a fair bit higher too without any impact, same for texture filter quality.
While you have many essential graphics features on low or minimal which barely impact performance, you seem to have shadow density, which is honestly almost completely unnoticeable, yet impacts performance heavily at 2, turn it to 0 as it's a completely pointless feature.
A 9600GT is about as fast as an 8800GT right? Well, at 1280x1024 and a quad at 3ghz, I cold run it at pretty much all settings at high with fps in the low 30's to high 40's on an 8800GTS512.
The performance in your 2nd pic is worse than it is now on my pc ( q6700 3.2 ghz, 6gb pc6400c4, GTX260 216sp SSC edition) with nearly all maxed and SUPERSAMPLING thus rendering @ 2zzz x 1yyy resolution...
Hell, I think my mate used to run the game smoother/faster on his agp ati 1950 pro...
