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From benchmarking the performance changes all of the different graphic settings brought, we determined the following settings worked out the best for us: 

Texture Quality

Bump            Full
Diffuse           Full
Specular        Full
Anisotropy     16

Visual Quality / Performance

Lighting Quality       High
Foliage Quality        High
Terrain Quality         High
Debris / Weather      Normal
Shader Effects         Normal
Effects Level            Normal
Shader Level            High
Anti-Aliasing              x2

Misc Options

Vertical Sync             Off
Shadows                   On
Soft Particles             Off
Smooth Foliage          Off

For the video card benching phase of this article, we used these 'Recommended' settings. These settings seem to offer you the best of both worlds: good image quality, and good performance.

If you have a more powerful system, the first thing you might want to raise is AA. And vice versa, if you have a less powerful system, you might want to cut AA, or maybe Shadows, to improve framerates.

For comparison, here is a image of the game using our 'Performance' settings. (Click on image to expand.)

And here is an image of the game with everything cranked. Notice the FPS difference, by looking at FRAPS counter in the upper-right corner. (Click on image to expand.)

As you can see, the screen shots look very similar, but our 'Performance' settings will give you almost twice the FPS as the 'High Quality' settings will.