I'm running AGP - since your using all the graphics mods your probably going way past your cards memory, while the ULi chip on the Asrock I have is one of the fastest AGP solutions out there (and on a budget board surprisingly), all of the last gen AGPs are pretty darn close in the end, so I doubt that is the case.

You can check how much is being used ingame with setdebugtext=13 in console, if your going past or within 15 megs of your cards buffer size, your not going to have a fun time as it'll start writing to system memory and that latency is killer irregardless of PCI-E or AGP.

Drop the distance mods unless your fond of going into the console and hitting pcb tp clear the buffer of unused textures since you have the same buffer size as mine. There is no other workaround for the background textures but manually pcbing quite a bit - every time you go outside, travel, or walk into a new terrain set you'll have to do it - not to mention after most fights. Quite tedious, so I'm debating on keeping 2xAA with 8xAF or dropping the mod, and it looks like the mod is going to lose seeing as it draws more resources.

A lot more is being drawn than farcry in the distance since it isn't all water in the background that they can just throw a simple texture over. Some people seem to have forgotten that little bit who are complaining... farcry was always an island or three, this is all land. So with that in mind, I'm quite happy with the gains I've gotten and even the default performance (even though it wasn't quite tweaked right - like ignoring the fact I have a dual core CPU). Enabling threading gave me nice gains all around - just it was like 15 lines to search through and change. Great QA there, but at least the option to fix it was there, so I shouldn't be complaining too harshly.

Try dropping the graphics mods if your passing your buffer size, I'm nearly sure that's your issue unless everything blows indoors as well (console pcb first just to clear the memory to check, as it'll hold onto most of those outdoor textures even if you don't want it to). If it's still slow, I have no other clues.

Good luck.