First, my specs: Phenom II Triple Core N830 (2.10 GHz), 4GB RAM, Radeon Mobillity HD 5650 1 GB VRAM. 

So I just grabbed this during the Steam sale, expecting to run it at at least medium settings. I boot the game up, it defaults to everything max with AA turned off, so I go with it. I'm getting 30 FPS dropping down to about 20 when I turn around fast or have a lot of buildings in view, which is to be expected. So, I cranked the settings down a little - same thing. I'm talking exact same frame rate as before. So, just to see, I bumped it down to everything low, V-Sync off, no AA, 800x600 and I get almost the same FPS - hovering around 30 and dropping into the lower 20s. Now, I'm not an FPS whore - I just want the game to run smooth, and it is definitely stuttering and skipping, but when I get no performance increase on the lowest settings I smell something fishy. So I'm thinking it could be one or two things.  
 
1)Ubi's DRM software running. 
2)It's unoptomized for the PC.  
3)My laptop simply doesn't have the power? I run BF:BC2, Crysis, Just Cause 2, all fine around medium-high so i just assumed I'd be able to run this. And CanYouRunIt agrees, but that may not be the most reliable representation.
 
Any tips on trying to get this to run better? I'm gonna monitor how the usage is spread out among cores and see if there's anything I can do. I've tried setting it to run with different CPU cores to no avail. I've read tons of posts on the Steam forums and Ubi's forums that state bad framerate issues on very beefy systems.

I can't remember what the exact setting was, but other than sliders for everything, is there a toggle for post processing? I remember the bloom effect was the one that's causing the most frame rate drop for me. I don't think the DRM takes up that much resource, but I could be wrong.

My first thought was maybe your processor was a bottleneck, I get a similar thing with Bad Company 2, but if you said you can run that and crysis ok then I am not sure. Check the usage of your processor anyway, just in case. 

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I can't remember what the exact setting was, but other than sliders for everything, is there a toggle for post processing? I remember the bloom effect was the one that's causing the most frame rate drop for me. I don't think the DRM takes up that much resource, but I could be wrong.

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" My first thought was maybe your processor was a bottleneck, I get a similar thing with Bad Company 2, but if you said you can run that and crysis ok then I am not sure. Check the usage of your processor anyway, just in case.  "

That does seem really weird, my PC bottlenecked Bad Company 2 and both cores of my processor were maxed out all of the time. My next guess would be an optimisation issue, make sure you have all of the latest drivers installed. Aside from that I'm clueless.

Processor, when I went from dual core to the i7, all the stuttering dissapeared. You can't use some core 2 quad either, you actually need 4 real cores or more with hyperthreading. Believe it or not, it actually shows all 8 cores (hypertheads) being used, so it does take some cpu power. Now i'm constantly getting 63 frames per second, no higher no less all because of a processor change. Also i'm not getting stuttering anymore at the very highest settings with 8X AA. Also 2.10Ghz is way to slow, it's equlivent to driving on the second gear and expecting not to be bottlenecked. I've been asked this question before, trust me I know because I have the game and I tried it on two different rigs and other ppl with a core 2 quad had the same problems regardless. You just have to live with it that open world games benifits from a good cpu for pc gaming. I had alot of stuttering in other games, it all dissapeared with my i7, not even saints row 2 stutters or gta 4.