Battlefield 3 performance 6990m since patches dropped?

I am trying to keep from driving myself crazy here, so if some folks who own a system similar to mine can give some input it would help.

BF3 ran beautifully on auto for me at release (which set everything on ultra or high except for deferred AA) at 1080p at about 45-50 FPS. I measured this with fraps on numerous occasions and all was well. After the patch in mid november, my FPS dropped drastically, to somewhere in the area of 30-38 FPS with no changes to anything on the PC but the BF3 patch. I tried and tried to figure out what was up, and found many others online with near identical problems and equally no idea why. I dropped my settings down to medium, which brought me NEAR to what I was getting pre patch, while trying countless configurations of drivers and settings. With a heavy dose of OC' I got up to about 80% of the performance, but still not where it should be and I dont want to run a massive OC (825/1025) all the time for LOWER frame rate than I had at launch on higher settings and stock clocks. The post launch FPS mentioned above, I will note, are on the AMD overdrive clocks which top out at 740 and 1000.

The night before the expansion released i formatted my PC and reinstalled everything, going with the exact same driver that ran the game so well (11.11a) at launch (this is a gaming machine, reinstalling windows for one game might seem extreme but it has little other purpose in its life). I fired up the game, and it seemed as though the game was actually running noticeably better, but I will note that i did not get much time to test, and it was very late. The impressions may have been skewed, but I dont think so. The next day of course the karkand expansion comes out and when I finally get time to play and the servers are back up, i log on and everything has gone to again. Im getting dips into the 20's when I scope, caspian is struggling to get 40FPS - the same crap that I thought i had gotten rid of by formatting finally.

Has anyone else with a machine similar to mine, or any machine period, noticed a gradual decline in BF3's performance since the launch? There are scattered posts on various forums around the internet, some of them quite large and loud, that have this same issue, but they are overshadowed by the ungodly number of other BF3 related posts out there and its hard to distinguish noise from actual fact. I know for some folks with desktops running 90FPS its not even a big deal to lose 10 or 15 FPS, but for us laptop users, we run at the margin sometimes and a 15 FPS drop is devastating for playability. I am trying to get some clear yes or no answers on whether this is a real problem that is quantifiably related to BF3 patch changes, or if its just observational discrepancy being blamed on BF3. As far as I know, there has been no acknowledgement from EA on this, and I am afraid its because of the scattered, unspecific nature of the complaints.

Any input would be appreciated.

NOTE: The entire post is in reference to the OLD MAPS. All testing an observation was kept to them, not the Karkand maps. I note this because the Karkand maps are well known to get lower performance due to increased geometry or poor optimization, or whatever. I forgot to note this in my big wall of text above.

 

It could potentially be related to the AMD drivers. I've not noticed any problems with my 485m through demo or final launch. If anything, it's sped up with the most recent few patches through Nvidia.

Was the patch that took the FPS hit for BF3 or AMD? Have you updated the latter drivers at all since then?

 

I play BF3 with an overclocking 780@1000 1.1v. and the new driver preview 12.1 which I am satisfied of so far. It holds my OC better. (I had artifacts with the 11.11c after couple hours)
I play all ULTRA without AA and I get an average 40fps sometimes it goes down to 30 on big maps. It really depends on the map you are playing.

 

It's the patch. I also get worst performance since the patch was released. Nothing you can do about it. The patch is not optimized for performance, and took away performance.

 

It seems like a driver issue with AMD. When I updated the drivers, I also saw a big performance hit over what I had before. Though I don't really notice it much doing game play. Yes every once in a while I can see a major dip in my FPS but it comes rarely and goes quickly that it's not much of an issue.

Sure I could go back to the older drivers and not have to be bothered with it but the newer ones fixes problems in other games, so it's kind of an evil trade off. It should work with everything, but oh well.