I'm playing BF3 in bursts. Every couple of moths, I'm playing it intesively for a month or so, before it peters off again for a bit. Everytime I come back though, the game runs smoother. I was quite afraid of Armored Kill, because Operation Firestorm crashed my rig with a scary regularity at first. All the way to the boot-up screen.

DICE really is getting a handle on Frostbite 2 now. The maps of Armored Kill are insanely big, filled to the brim with details and destructibilty, featuring scores and scores of vehicles - and I've got zero performance issue on my 1GB HD5870 on high/ultra settings. It's unbelievably smooth and pretty. In fact, it's smoother than it ever was before.

How's performance for you guys? Did BF3 and Frostbite 2 improve for you too? Did the console versions get smoother too?

I recently uninstalled it, I would like to give it another go. It would be nice because performace was always super spotty for me. Sometimes I would play a variety of maps on all high/ultra settings and it would be as smooth as butter, then randomly it would run like shit even after I tone it down to low/medium.

The only problems I've ever had with BF3 was due to the game not getting enough memory. Once I fixed that (which was extremely easy, once I figured out how to do it), it has run beautifully. Haven't touched my settings since I set them.

I've got a 7770 and I've had no performance issues.

Then again, I didn't even mess with the graphics options, I left it right where auto put it (high textures, medium everything else). The only thing I did was set it to 720p. I could probably bump it up, but thus far it's stayed at consistent 60FPS without any stuttering or drops that I notice, which is precisely what I wanted, so I don't really want to mess with it.

EDIT: It's worth noting that I've only been playing since Saturday evening. From what I've understood, though, BF3 has been well optimized from the get-go, it's just better optimized now than it was at launch.

Drivers have also gotten better over time, every few months Nvidia posts one with X% BF3 performance increase.