FPS Plummets In Battles

[mitchewr]

So I just started playing and have been having trouble with my FPS. I've been scouring the web for help on fixing the issue and made lots of adjustments but my FPS still drops to unplayable in battles.

Here are my PC specs:

AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2Ghz
4 GB DDR3 RAM
Windows 7 64-bit
NVidia 650Ti Boost 2GB RAM driver version 340.52 (just updated last night)

I went through and unparked all of my cpu cores and turned down/off all of the following settings in the display options:

Particles, Effects, Flora, Ambient Occlusion, Shadows, Fog Shadows, & Terrain. I also set the render distance to 1000 instead of the 4000 it was set to. I tried going into the video card settings and changing the "Frame Render Ahead" as suggested in a "how to fix it" thread for this issue on Steam forums but that just made things worse.

When I am playing, and I'm facing a direction with no friendly or enemy units on screen, I am getting 60+ FPS, but as soon as I turn and face a battle or get close to some action, FPS plummets down to 10, 6, etc.

Occasionally it will throw the [GPU] tag next to the FPS, but most of the time it throws the [CPU] flag.

Any ideas on something else that I could try to get the game to run? Does the game literally require 4 GB of RAM, all to itself? I do have it set so that all 4 CPU cores are capable of handling the game. I've tried bumping the priority of the PlanetSide process but that didn't resolve the issue either.