Came back after a few months.....runs like crap

When the game first launched, I bought the CE, and had the game maxed in everything except for Ambient Occlusion and Depth of Field....and then I turned Depth of Field on and it still ran just fine....I quit in November to give the game time to get fixed and went and played WoW with my Dad (long story, but in short, it helped me find him again after not talking for a long time....and it was the only way I knew I could get in contact with him)....anyways, so I came back last week, I reformatted my hard-drive, did a clean Win7 install, which is what I was running before....updated the game AND all my drivers fully and got all the up to date stuff....and the game runs WAY worse then it did before....to the point that I can only run it acceptably on Standard now across the board....

It's weird as hell, and has me terribly confused because I had bought this computer (built it myself, not pre-built) specifically FOR this game.....did something happen with the patches that I'm not aware of, or should I roll back my ATI drivers for the older ones? I know my way around computers....a lot, but this has me incredibly confused, and slightly more than irritated. Thanks in advance for the replies and/or tips.

They added General Drawing Quality and Background Drawing Quality Which i run at standard because there no real point in running it in highest i don't seem much of a different i could run it on high but just put it on standard.

I keep both general and background quality at standard. Everything else is maxed out with AO and DoF turned on.

Using a single GTX580, I get pretty solid 45-60 fps depending on how crowded an area is. With the drawing quality set higher than standard, it begins to run like crap, and the improvement in texture quality is not worth the performance hit.

If I had to wager a guess, I'd say SE gave people the option to turn the graphical settings higher than even today's top-of-the-line cards can handle as future proofing, so a couple years from now when we're running GTX 790 cards, and SE finally implements DX11 support, the game will still look sweet even though it's a few years old.