So my problem is that the game starts to lag pretty heavily when I set the quality slider to max once the Screen Space Ambient Occlusion is also enabled. This lag appears when looking at the engine from different angles and also there are small pauses between the changes of the engine sounds when rising the engine rpm in benchmark. However, if I disable the Screen Space Ambient Occlusion then it runs ok, -OR- if I keep the Screen Space Ambient Occlusion enabled and take just one notch away from the top quality, then it also runs smooth.
My system:
i7 2600K OC’d to 4.3 MHz
GTX 470 Stock
4Gt RAM
Win7
Intel SSD
1920 x 1200
Recommended Requirements:
Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/7
Processor: Quad Core
Ram: 2gb
Graphics Device: NVidia 260GTX/ATI Radeon 4870 (Must support Pixel Shader 3.0)
Internet Access
So my question is that is this normal that Automation wont run at its full glory with this kind of system? Or is there a possible problem with the graphical performance of Automation? Since I belive im well over the recommended specs with my system.
Heyya!
What you experience is perfectly normal, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion basically makes it so that every frame
has to be rendered twice, so anything around 50% of performance drop can be expected. And the very high
texture/graphics-slider setting doesn’t make things more fluid either.
This is actually an interesting topic in general, because there are some common misconceptions about games,
graphics performance and the hardware requirements connected to it. In fast moving games like FPS you need a
much lower graphic fidelity to make things look good: lower resolution textures, less polygons, etc. In a rather
static game like Automation you need very high fidelity stuff to make it look good, as the player studies details
much more frequently. So what does take more performance then? The GFX card does not really care if stuff
moves or not… so yes, a game like Automation is actually more taxing in that regard.
Sure, the engine could probably be optimized by a hundred Crytek employees to squeeze out some x% additional
performance… but that still wouldn’t solve the high requirements “problem”. I put quotes on that because being
able to run at the highest setting can hardly be considered a problem. 
We have put in higher fidelity options
in order to make the game “future proof” - this does not mean you have to be able to run it on those settings
with a machine of today.
I would suggest you keep SSAO turned off for the moment, the PC that can handle that without an issue is
probably somewhere in the $3000 price region for now. 
Oh, one important thing to note (and we probably need to make this clearer in the settings) the top option on the viewport resolution slider, whilst it makes everything look a bit crisper, is only designed for people with REALLY high end machines who want an excuse to use all that graphics power.
The setting that will be suitable for most people will be everything on (including SSAO) but the resolution slider one notch from full. That’s even what us developers run it at, as our machines aren’t up to it either!
Ok thanks for the lesson about graphical performance. If its not even supposed to run at full graphics on my system then im totally ok with that. Belive it or not but I just really wasn’t expecting that this game would put my system to its knees .
EDIT: FordManFromHell just got TURBOCHARGED!
We have put in higher fidelity options