After knocking my head against the wall with my 25 FPS I have found a few things that help with this beta.
This game is demanding for sure and the average COD player is having quite a time trying to adjust to it's gameplay. So lets give them all the FPS help they need.After all this is a great squad game despite the things it does not offer to many in the gaming community. I went from 25 FPS to 65 to 70 FPS

Rig:
Intel xtreme 6800 OCed @ 3.2ghz
Nvidia 260 GTX
4 gig ram
XP 32 bit

Downloading Liseda's BFBC2 Configurator will allow XP users to get out of the locked down antialias (1x) and give you settings that change as compared to all the locked settings that I am experiencing in the GUI. Download here http://ohlawl.com/liseda.html

Next try changing the command line in your shortcut by adding +fullproc at the end. It should look like this. People are claiming that the beta is not taking advantage of the second core in a dual core processor.
It should look like this. Make sure you do this with a new shortcut.
"C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Battlefield Bad Company 2 - BETA\BFBC2Game.exe" +fullproc

Switch Virtual Memory (pagefile) to second drive IE a drive that the game is not executing from.There is much debate as to whether this helps with FPS and or the cpu load.I can only say I increased my FPS by 5 to 7 FPS while watching the map at an exact location in an empty server.You can't hurt anything by doing this.I will say for sure that my entire Windows experience is a lot faster after making this change.

If you have any other knowledge please post it here in this thread.And lets keep our fingers crossed that EA/Dice will continue to work out the bugs and this game will be playable in a crisp way for more than just a portion of the gaming community.

Regards Ibleedv20

So how did you get increase in FPS?+fullproc doesn't work in BFBC2 and that Configurator has few more options regarding AA and AF but I don't see how you can get 100% more FPS by increasing your AA. What were your settings before and after? Low Mid Hi? I had it all on MID apart from shadow LOW AA and AF 1 Bloom HSAO OFF I got average 19 FPS.When I used that configurator and used Highest performance option in it I got Avg 25 FPS and that puts everything on LOW.
AMD dualcore 3Ghz 4GB RAM GTX275 XP x 32 btw my CPU is only running at %65 load in BFBC2 which is strange.From this I can only assume that this beta is still very badly optimized

None of the settings in the GUI had any affect for me.Even when I dropped them down to Low.It's as if they are locked.For me.Even after reinstall it was the same.The configurator allowed me to have a higher AA choice to eliminate some jaggies.

[WindowSettings]
Width=1600
Height=900
Fullscreen=true
RefreshRate=60
VSync=false
[Sound]
Quality=low
VoipEnable=true
[Graphics]
Effects=low
Soldiers=low
Vehicles=low
Overgrowth=low
Undergrowth=low
StaticObjects=low
Terrain=low
Shadows=low
Bloom=false
HSAO=false
MSAA=1
Water=low
MainQuality=custom
Texture=low
DxVersion=9
Aniso=1
Detail=medium

I still get max 25 FPS and only difference is I have AMD and yours is Intel yours runs .2GHZ faster which is not a factor BF is only using %65 of my CPU I hope this is only BETA and it's going to be better optimised for full game. 25FPS would be unplayable in COD but I don't have any lag and it feels OK but least 60 would be nice

repi from DICE has confirmed that fullproc is a placebo.
I tested it today and realized it would not work for me.

Setting HBAO off in your dx10, dx11 drivers will do wonders though (according to repi).

Also, repi did say they have some stuff to optimize in the game.

My hope is that there is a switch to turn off sound processing. As much as i love the sound...i don't want my game to stutter because the CPU is bottle-necked. Devs need to respect the average system out there. Push the envelope, sure...but don't make it unattainable.

Here's a new discovery that may help some of you guys with your frame rate in the beta:

go to Documents>BFBC2Beta>GameSettings.ini
change SoundSystemSize=1 to SoundSystemSize=2
Apparently what this does is changes your Audio rendering from Software to Hardware. This will free up some extra CPU usage.

I tested it out and I noticed a 10fps increase, however I am running a Core i7 920 @ 4.2 Ghz, and it might have just been a "lucky" test but I thought i'd post it here just incase.

Do you have a reference this?
My understanding was that the audio was being processed on the CPU as there was no capability to do it on most sound cards.
I'll try it out to see if there's any diff but I'm just curious as to what the change is actually doing.

Thanks for the tip.

I just found a post on the steam forum a few days ago that showed this configuration, so I can't say for-sure if this works, nor can I take any credit for it if it does. Just thought it may be useful to some people on here as I noticed an increase of FPS on my system and didn't notice any change of sound quality.

Original Post:

"Get better performance. In Gamesettings.ini change to 'soundsystemsize=2'. Enjoy. Apparently as stock BC2 makes your audio software controlled, taking up to as much as 1 core to do so, with this setting it changes it to hardware. I am told by dual core cpu users I know that this will give a large boost in performance, I noticed an improvement on my quad unless I am imagining things."

here's the link to the thread on the steam forums: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s ... systemsize

It doesn't matter if you free some CPU as my CPU usage is %63 when i runBFBC2 . I have 3 years old 3Ghz dual core so this game looks really badly optimized. Strange thing is that I get 20-25 on low settings but 25-30 on medium with2xAA and 8xAF.The soundsistemsize doesn't make any difference to CPU usage or game performance in my case only the gun sound is muffled