Okay, having played a bit I can safely say the game is......VERY GOOD! I can't see where all the complaints are coming from at all? Maybe I just get lucky with games all the time or something?
Yes, up close some textures look low quality but you are rarely eyeballing surfaces when playing anyway and from a close enough distance, say a few feet, everything looks really crisp and sharp. I got no tearing out of the box and I only enabled the additional text file mod mentioned earlier:
seta vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly2 "8192"
seta vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly "8192"
seta vt_pageimagesizeunique "8192"
seta vt_pageimagesizevmtr "8192"
I enabled transcoding and am using 4xFSAA, at no point did the framerate stutter or fluctuate outside of 60fps. I also note that there is absolutely no texture pop-in for me.
I played using a GTX460 and 4.3GHz i5 and 16GB RAM.
I noted that my GPU meter widget for Windows on the 2nd screen reporting VRAM usage being around 250-300MB while outside in the wasteland. Quite remarkable really as I was expecting it to be higher going by the guides saying if you use the additional config file mods you should have ideally a 1.5GB card.
Loading times were also very fast, only a few seconds to load everything so far.
I'm glad to be buying this
Also, I noticed that if you crash in the buggy you get some cool physics deaths like in another certain driving game
(skip to 2:37)
(I've enabled the console to try fov changing using a guide online so be wary of that as it disables achievements)
The shotgun sounds so sublime, my speaker's woofers absolutely love it! So much recoil feedback
Oh and just like with BF3, the GTX 460 continues to amaze me as it can keep up with today's titles easily
Also I can see how some people can get motion sickness, the game is almost too smooth, it's so smooth that I initially felt a bit woozy but adjusted quite quickly.