Correct. FPS doesn't change at that intense location between 1080p totally maxed with 4x MSAA and 720p no AA.
It seems my FPS will never EVER drop far below 60, occasion drops into 50's. No reason to complain, but i'm not done. Below are posted benchmarks from Oman to see SLI benefit with real numbers and to see if minimums are any better with SLI despite the CPU bottleneck. Something special about these runs; they are worst case with chopper blasting rockets right down on me and screen filled with smoke and total chaos with 60-64 players at construction site area. I had the luck of the chopper action being very similar for both runs. This is about the most CPU intense actual gameplay scenario I could find apart from standing in one spot on the hotel or TV station. This reflects CPU limited situations of actual gameplay.
Benches @ 4.6ghz HT on (will do HT off later)
SINGLE CARD
MIN: 38
MAX: 128
AVERAGE: 80
SLI
MIN: 51
MAX: 178
AVERAGE: 103
This is roughly a 25% improvement in a very cpu limited situation. I'll take it. The difference between 38 and 51 is enough to make gameplay much smoother thanks to the additional GPU headroom, but with a faster CPU it could be much better of course.
Sorry to bump and quote myself, but I had to in order to share the details.
New specs: Asus P9X79 Pro, 3930K, 16gb corsair 1600mhz 9-9-9-24-2T, corsair H80 cooler.
OK, 3930K @ 4.5 HT on. Did two runs on Oman. These were two full games from start to finish, 1200 tickets! First run had 64 players, second run had between 40 and 50 players. Of course, during a 1200 ticket game every immaginable scenario was encountered. A LOT of time was spent up high on buildings overlooking the whole map as I am primarily a sniper. During gameplay FPS seems to be generally higher on average and I am seeing at times max FPS a lot higher than before, possibly due to increased PCI-E bandwidth. Appearant CPU bottlenecked situations seem roughly the same however. These situations are in teh same spots as before, where GPU usage falls off sharply to arouns 60%.
I noticed at times, that even though I am behind a building and stare at the wall, the FPS falls and GPU usage falls if the rest of the map is infront of me behind that building. It seems the game is rendering things that aren't necessary for what you are looking at, and perhaps there is some game optimization that needs to be done. So, BF3 was helped only marginally with the 3930K leaving me to believe that its either the game itself (most likely IMO) or the game only scales to 4 cores at a maximum and more IPC is needed. Either way I am happy with the new rig for a variety of reasons and will be keeping the new hardware and will sell my 2600K setup promptly. No reformat was done upon new hardware installation however. Windows just started right up and i installed drivers. Maybe it would help to format, but I doubt it. Finally, here are the two runs I have done so far.
Run 1 - SLI on and 64 players
MIN: 51
MAX: 181
AVERAGE: 107
Run 2 - SLI and 40-50 players
MIN: 56
MAX: 201
AVERAGE: 121
EDIT: I have heard some people from actual hardware review sites claim that the 3930K is useful in BF3 multiplayer. Perhaps under some circumstances it may be helpful, maybe with 3 or more cards or something of that nature. But based on this first test run, I would not at all recommend anything over a 2500K for this game. Now, if things change from a reformat or some other factor comes into play, my thinking may change. But for now BF3 seems to have no clue that it has 2 more cores to use based SOLELY on the back to Karkand maps and in certain spots of those maps. Standard maps might be different.