Hi, my PC ran it fine it was an old i7, 12gb ram and Gtx 580.  I used optimised settings so it was mostly low.  There was occasional screen tears as you moved with the arrow keys, I think it certainly could be better but was very much playable. 

so I just upgraded to a 970 for 218 quid delivered.  specs wise it's tripple the spec of my 580.  So at 200 I couldn't really grumble for a quick upgrade.  I cant justify a whole new rig just for ashes.  and the 1070 prices are way to much to put into a 5 year old PC.

It does play it much smoother and the optimised defaults are highs and mediums.  I can now run the dx12 version too.   Yes I think it was worth it but I will be honest I was hoping it would look substatially better once I got to high.  Maybe everyone is using a bigger screen than my 24" Screen. 

Benchmark went from 2500 to 4500 just by changing the graphics card. 

I'm not sure if my pc can run it. I have:

Settings 1920x1080p at high no MSAA Vsync enabled.

Windows 10

FX 8370 cpu bus 212 clocked at 4.65 ghz turbo

1 Sapphire Nitro+OC 8gb RX 480 at 1342 mhz

16gb G skill cas 7 clocked at 1867 mhz ram

Should I lower the graphics settings?

If there was once weakness in that syste

Should you lower the graphics? That is very much a personal choice depending on how you see the performance. If there was one weakness to your system I'd point to the CPU. I run Ashes on a 970 on Extreme, and your 480 is more powerful than my card so you should be more than fine on High. I am on an intel i7 4790k which is considered more powerful though, so it all depends on how much your CPU affects performance. Run the benchmark in dx11 and dx12 and see what you get. I would think your system would benefit very significantly from dx12. The benchmark is very taxing though so I would only take that as a very general guide, FPS is normally much higher in an actual game.

Edit: I will just add sometimes heavily overclocked CPUs, particularly AMDs, can result in less stable gameplay, as the game is able to use all the cores more effectively than most games so it will push them hard. If your gameplay is stable then you don't have to worry about it

I am using DX 12 and it didn't want to run at 4.3 ghz, so I upped the clock to 4.65 and it's running okay until there are 40-80 units on screen fighting so I'm thinking it's the processor...

What do you mean its ok with that many units on the screen? Do you mean performance goes down or it crashes? I would be surprised if performance gets worse with just so few units so I'm guessing it crashes. If so then if you put the processor back to its factory clock of 4.0GHz then it should be fine/stable. 

I'm guessing the GPU is a later upgrade? If so its worth checking the PSU is up to scratch too.

Well before I increased the clock it was crashing when the match would start when it zoomed in at the beginning, and afterwards it was running for a bit at 4315 mhz. My PSU is 1000w. My cpu temp didn't go past 54c and my gpu temp didn't go past 65c. I did notice the gpu was running close to max load. I had to do some tweaking because the voltage wasn't stable and after that it was quite stable and running okay.

Edit: turns out I just had to increase the voltage to compensate for the higher clock..

your running a hybrid crossfire setup?  Disable the on board video, the 4000, then run it again.

I run a FX 8320, 16 gig ram, GTX950 2 gig, and I have no problems. At default settings I will get like 27 fps, I do turn a couple of graphics settings down, not alot, and get 35-37 fps. It isnt your processor if your running the 8320 or above. I started with a 6 core, and did acutally gain 6-8 fps from updating to the 8320. Not much, but I really upgraded to rip video, the upgrade made a lot bigger difference on the video ripping cutting time by almost half.