Assassin's Creed Performance Issues

[utopiafallen]

I just recently completed a new build and have been playing Assassin's Creed patched to 1.02. Judging by the reviews on my card, I should not be having any real performance issues, but I am. I have all the settings maxed running at 1680x1050 with VSync off and I get pretty steep framerate dips at certain points, particularly noticeable when doing a bird's eye view of Damascus from one of the viewing towers. Doing a leap of faith off one of those towers also has severe stuttering during the leap up into the air sequence when the camera zooms out pretty far.



Here's my build:
Phenom X4 9950BE 125W
Asus M3A79-T Deluxe
Diamond HD 4870 1GB
Corsair Dominator 2x2GB DDR2-1066 5-5-5-15
Western Digital 640GB
Xclio 1000W PSU
Vista Business SP1 64-bit
Catalyst 8.10 w/o Hotfix

So I've got two questions:
1. What performance should I be expecting from this build in Assassin's Creed v1.02?
2. Am I doing something wrong to cause the stuttering and framerate dips? Setting Multisampling to 1 reduces the dips significantly as well as setting Shadows to 2, but I was under the impression that I should be able to handle those settings maxed at my resolution.

Thanks for any help.

 

[Kil4Thril]

"Curse him! Curse the Christian king and his army of infidels"

Sorry, I have nothing to help you, I just had to get that off my chest

 

[D3z]

Have you tried the hotfix? Those specs should run the game fine.
Can't really help you there, coz I'm playing it on the Xbox. You might want to start here