Battlefield 3 (ATI HD 5970)

Are you asking what Single GPU can handle Ultra?, I don't think there is one yet that can handle it on ultra without low fps. How many monitors are you running on that 5970?, and at what resolution?

I'm running it on 1920x1080 with one monitor... How high can I go with that one gpu then?

Check to make sure your card is running the new drivers and CAP for crossfire.
You may need to make sure you are running crossfire on the card as some dual gpu cards have the driver selection to enable and disable crossfire.
By the way the 5970 is a dual gpu card and should perform well enough to have most ultra settings at 1080p, but you may have to not use AA.
Btw, single gpu ultra settings is possible with minimum frames not dropping too low. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7970-benc...

First off, what resolution are you talking about?

I do not know much about ATI cards, but I am quite sure that you cannot run BF3 on ultra with a 5970 at 1920x1080. I can barely run it on Ultra at 1920x1080 and I have dual nvidia 560ti GPUs in SLI. Granted I have a CPU bottleneck with my i5-2400 (my mistake but you live and learn).

What are your clock speeds? Have you done any overclocking? Anti-aliasing should be set very low. Try a lower resolution if all else fails.

Unfortunately I do not think it is possible to run BF3 on Ultra with a single 5970 at 1920x1080 (and I mean at a relatively constant 60FPS). The game still looks great using lower settings though.

Edit: Oh, I did not know it was a dual GPU card. Please take my advice lightly as I have only been PC gaming for ~6 months.

Actually I forgot to mention my real problem with playing BF3... It'll always take me forever to load into the game, and when I leave a game or tab out or anything my computer gets horrifyingly slow and I can't move my mouse or do anything with it for a good couple of minutes.

I have 8 gigs of ram and I don't have a lot of programs open while I play bf3... I never got a chance to see how much BF3 takes up since everything becomes so laggy.

I have not done any overclocking and I have no idea what my clock speeds are

The OP's card is much better than my crossfire setup and as such should have no problem with ultra with no msaa @1080p. Currently i can play the game on Ultra settings with no msaa without it dropping below 40.

I would download something like MSI Afterburner or some overclocking tool. http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm

Then you can tweak your settings and see what your clock speeds are. You can also download a benchmark tool like Heaven DX11 (it's what I use). I would definitely read up on overclocking before you try anything though.

You should also close down any programs you don't need while playing. Download something like AdvancedSystem Care, CCcleaner, etc. and clean up junk files, delete empty shortcuts, defragment your hard drive, and the clean up the registry. But don't just do things all willy-nilly cause you might run into issues if you do not know what you are doing.

Seems like you guys got this one covered, I'll let you two take this one  

Are you running 32 bit ot 64

64bit

I do know that there have been quite a few proplems with BF3 on PC and there are still bugs in the game.My cousin has tried everything to get the game to work properly,so it could be the game and not your system as to why your having so many problems.

I Dont Get Why You Cant Go Past Med Detail With Good Performance With That Card, I have A GTX460 SE @ 850/1700/2000 An Im Running Great At 1920x1200 With 2x Forced AA And 16x AF, Everything On High (Except For Motion-Blur Witch I Hate And Alwayse Turn Off In Any Game That Supports It)With No Stuttering, Slowing Or Lagging Whatsoever.

Well I'm going to look silly here, but I just tried it with Ultra on and now it magically started working! Only problem left is with the lag after I leave games..

That lag might be the computer taking too long to release the memory and process the game is taking up after it's closed, it's more of a system issue than a game issue.

Your question is not specific enough to give a simple answer.

Battlefield 3 single player mode will run really well at FULL HD ultra settings if you just changle that first antialiaing option to disabled and all other options can be left on ultra including antialiasing post - I finishied single player story on radeon 5850 and core 2 duo 3.3GHz
4GB ram,
these settings at 1920x1080 resolution and performance was really enjoyable 99% of the time over 30fps...

Battlefield 3 multi player on 64 man conquest large is much more demanding tho - for starters you need at least around 1.5GB ram on your graphic card for ultra textures when on single player 1GB didnt give me any truble... Most probably you will need to run 64 man mode on high settings on most demanding maps - maybe on 1.5GB vram cards you would be able to use ultra...