I had no issues with frame rates at all.  The only option I made sure was turned down was shadows, I had shaders etc turned on or set to max.

My computer is;

Processor; E8500

Memory: 8GB

Graphics: 560 Ti

Q6600, 4Gig of ram and a GTX 470.....running the game at medium very smooth.

The city instances (when doing the story line) were sometimes very laggy for me, although there was not much going on. The rest of the game ran fine.

This BETA was CPU capped.

If you want better perfomance please go to Taskmanager > Processes > GW2.exe Right Click and set priority to High.

Also please make sure your Windows is setup to run all the cores you have and not a single one.

I have fairly old rig (4 years old) with ati 6850 (entry level gfx card)

And game runs 20-30 fps with all at highest , and just shadows low

Apparently right now the game isn't tuned properly to fully use the graphics card hardware, so it is VERY CPU dependant.

That's the most likely bottleneck.

But one quick trick is to go under your Task Manager while GW2 is running and set the CPU priority for gw2.exe to "high" or "real time" and it makes a bit of a difference.

I have a 4.0ghz quad and it worked well.

I ran the game all weekend fully maxed out without any issues even in large WvW sieges.  However I am not running it on a low end system. 

i7 3930k oc'ed to 4.5ghz , 16gb of ram and a GTX 680. 

As this is a new system I keep a pretty close eye on processor usage and core temps in any of my games.  I noticed this weekend that GW 2 was absoultely crushing core one, running it up to 90-100% usage and warming it up to 60c.  This is a water cooled system but those are the highest temps I have seen on this system so far.  The game seemed to be really processor reliant. 

My son who runs an older dual core was having issues in keep sieges on medium settings, it was not a huge issue but enough that next beta weekend we will spend more time looking into systyem tweaks to improve his frame rates and less time trying to cram all the game into one weekend. 

The huge amount of people who had serious issues with performance in GW2 shows it's just not ready yet for release.

They have so much to do in the performance area it's scarey.

They admit themselves that the game is CPU bound - and is not making use of powerful graphics cards at all right now,.

I plan to upgrade to i7 with gtx 570 at least just for gw2 and I hope that's going to be enough for WvWvW combat because my current HD 5870 wont hack it.