Whenever I look to the skies or more down to the ground I get a nice 60 FPS, but whenever I look straight forward in the middle where alot of objects and scenery are in the picture, my framerate drastically drops to 25 and below. I have a 6970, running ultra, 4aa. Fxaa, object detail fade and the rest is still on default " ultra" . Is this just how it is or is there anything I can do to make my FPS higher when looking at alot of scenery?

Can I change my appearance later in the game with the console?

Turn shadows to medium or high. They always svck a lot out of a GPU.

That has got to be a bug. Either that or this game is truly a console port if bethesda's optimization amounted to that. My 6970 can run BF3 maxed out on ultra at 1680 x 1050 with an average of 40 fps and BF3 is leagues ahead of any other game out there in terms of how demanding it is.