For what it is worth at this point (and that may not be much), I bought and installed the game today and got the exact same results as Desert did in the very first post in this thread. After jerking around with the video settings for a bit, I came here and found this thread. I removed 4G of RAM and the problem is fixed. I now have all settings at "Very High" with no issues other than I am down to 4G RAM from 8G. My specs are below:
VIDEO:
HIS (ATI) Radeon HD 4890 Turbo Video Card
1024MB DDR5, PCI Express 2.0 x16 900Mhz core
MEMORY:
Patriot Viper 4096MB PC12800
Dual Channel DDR3 Memory - 1600MHz
Four sticks of 2Gigabytes (8G total)
OPERATING SYSTEM:
Windows Vista Ultimate (x64) Service Pack 2
MOTHERBOARD:
MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL 790FX-GD70 (MS-7577)
Bus Clock: 200 megahertz
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. V1.4 07/02/2009
PROCESSOR:
3.40 gigahertz AMD Phenom II X4 965 AM3
512 kilobyte primary memory cache
2048 kilobyte secondary memory cache
6144 kilobyte tertiary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (4 total)
Not hyper-threaded
MONITOR:
Dual Samsung SyncMaster 23.1"
SOUND:
Creative SB X-Fi Fatal1ty
