There's a lot of entitled people who are upset because they kicked everything to ultra and yeah , that's where that 7-12 fps is. Most people can't fathom fiddling with the settings a bit and maybe lowering them.

The dev sent out a forum post on what settings are causing the biggest lag. I followed their advice and it is completely playable. I'm about 10 hours in and I'm loving it

In my experience turning off dof and global illumination takes you from 20 fps to 80 (1440p, rtx 3090)

A laptop with a 1660ti 6GB got me 20-25fps 1080p low to medium around 10- 20k population. But I turned nearly everything off except for level of detail. Turning off Vsync somehow made it run around 5fps faster.

I'm getting about 30 FPS with 2090

The key though as far as I can see is to make sure it's on the SSD, that speed up level streaming pretty quickly.

Vsync also doesn't work, but I haven't had time to figure out if there's a workaround.

I don't know who's reporting 12 frames per second but they must be running on a potato. It's definitely not well optimised, but it's not that bad.

If you want to blame someone, blame the producers, not the devs. They don't want to be pushed to strict deadlines with artificially limited budgets and whatever enshittification method the execs bought into this week. They want to make good games, but often they work under stifling conditions.

Radeon VII (damaged from a psu failure, though). 1080 ultra, no motion blur, no AA. 25-30 fps, as expected on this card (a fully working one I'd expect ~70, it's about half dead).