Interesting, I'm running 177 with an HD 7850 2GB @1920x1200, full screen, all gpu options on high/ultra (max) with the exceptions of DoF which is OFF, Bloom which is OFF, & motion blur which is also OFF. 16x AF set in-game; 1x smaa set in-game. I've never seen the problem alluded to in this thread, with save games or otherwise. FX-6300 cpu, btw. Win8.1x64, 8GB ram.
I have even noticed that the slight but constant hitching I was getting with texture streaming turned ON (which prompted me to turn it off) is now *gone* with Texture Streaming turned ON, starting in 169 and extending through 177. That means either the multicore scheduling issues have been fixed; or else texture streaming has been disabled within the game...;) My guess is that the streaming has been fixed--but I could certainly be wrong.
Want to suggest that nobody should be running any 3rd-party gpu applications like Afterburner/Radeon Pro with this game, and that all driver control panel settings be set to "Application Controlled." I noticed that although I thought everything was fine with Radeon Pro running behind the game--it actually wasn't. Also, with 3rd-party image-quality applications running behind the game it's entirely possible they could be eating up gpu resources attempting to enforce driver-forced modes of FSAA and other things (Supersampling) that won't actually function properly with the game engine--and could be sucking up performance overhead while producing no or very, very slight image-quality improvements. I found shutting down all such programs was best for my system when running this game--and of course not trying to force IQ modes through the driver control panel.
