My specs aren't superior stuff (GTX 570, 3,2 GHZ Phenom II X4), but my FPS are pretty decent for it.
I'll do some club races and see how it works. For the M235i races I had to leave the custom skin folders empty, so the video card etc. had not to load in all the custom skins and so it used the simple default white ones by default automatically. That solved it back then and the performance was fine from then on (before I had 5-10 sec. freezes in FP, which was undriveable of course). However, now it seems to be a different problem than then.
Sometimes I think, it's just Win7 in the background running not smooth anymore (since the AC menue movements sometimes stutters and pauses as well, but as far as I remember that has been always the case, so..). Who knows. At least the (in general known) issue "svchost (netsvcs)" process in Win7 occupying 25% of CPU load all the time is gone now since 1-2 weeks, after the latest Win7 updates !!
So the CPU load is at 0-3 % in idle dektop conditions again.
Thx, for the tipps (though I know al lof it already). I'll check, if the steam offline mode makes a difference. But I don't think so in this particular mattter.