I'm on an i7 with 4 gigs of ram and a 2gb 4870x2

I assumed this would be enough to run the game adequately, however I get from 4-5 fps and incredible texture and object popin - it's unplayable

What makes this worse is that I cannot identify which of the settings in game it is that are causing these absurd problems because the video menu has no options in it!

What on earth is going on?

ATI(AMD) still not able to prepare drivers, long story mate, too long and we already thought that era has passed. id proved us wrong.

Don't listen to this loser. 11.9 and earlier drivers can improve the experience, but Nvidia users are having a lot of the same problems. The game/engine is [censored] currently. Wait for a patch/fix or pursue a refund.

I don't understand why I cannot even edit my own graphics settings though?

The whole thing just seems bizarre.

Because the game is a console port. Think about the graphics settings you get for an Xbox360 or a PS3, that is exactly what you get here.

back off

True and not true. The game auto-detects your PCs power and sets additional options accordingly. You can find these options in C:\Users\[user name]\AppData\Local\LAG\data\settings under the renderer_settings.xml file. Changing them won't help with the ugly texture pop-ins or most performance issues, though, and there's really no reason you shouldn't be able to change these in game.

No one said you couldn't change them via an ini script or console commands. The minimalist menu is due to the console port and the approach that was taken by id for their new engine -- run on any system, optimized, at 60fps, targeted to consoles.

I think after seeing all the bugs and issues all of us can sit back and safely assume the port wasn't given much effort, the menus, the game, heck even the starting screen where you have to press Enter to exit the game, all feel like a console.

This is really tragic, I was looking forward to this