Okay, pretty confident now that I've got the game working how it should, without disabling the crowd, but I have dropped the resolution to 1280x800. This is with a 8800GT, so if you're using on-board graphics or something lightweight, you may need to drop the resolution quite a way down.
It's not quite as pretty and gains some jaggies, but it's a lot more playable. Basically the intent is to be more selective about which texture filters are on, but I think forcing vertical sync off and dropping max prerendered frames to 1 are also important. So now let's move the solution into beta testing, ie, does it work for anyone else?
If you don't know what I'm talking about read these guides first and you should have more confidence. The settings pertain mostly to nVidia, but in theory could be adapted to the ATI control panel.
http://www.planetcricket.org/forums...i-cards-suffering-slow-performance-30884.html
http://www.planetcricket.org/forums...a-cards-suffering-slow-performance-30946.html
aniso filtering - off
AA gamma - off
AA mode - off
AA setting - doesn't matter, you've already turned it off
AA transparency - off
conformant texture clamp - doesn't matter
error reporting - doesn't matter
extension limit - doesn't matter
max pre-rendered frames - 1
multidisplay/mixed-gpu accel - whatever is relevant to your system
texture filtering aniso filter option - on (but shouldn't matter)
texture filtering neg LOD bias - allow
texture filtering quality - high perf
texture filtering trilinear optimization - off
threaded optimization - on
triple buffering - off
vsync - force off