It does make you wonder though why the called it a total rewrite if the clouds, grass, trees, particles and the other stuff is exactly the same as before.
A few more days to optimize? They said it was almost finished 5 months ago, couldn't they have optimized them before now?

The things you are listing are all textures. Would make no sense to re-do them.

The engine is the code, how these textures are handled. So you don`t necessarily see any difference.

But they ARE the problem, they all cause major FPS drop, i know they would "look" no different but are the things that need "redoing" in the code to stop the stutters and slow down.

I agree, its not a "total" rewrite of the graphics, but rewriting the game engine to more effectively display the graphics. i.e. spreading the work out on different cpu cores. This is a major overall that would certainly take alot of time investigating, rewriting, testing, investigating, rewriting, testing, repeat add-naesem. Makes me wonder as others have suggested, going to this modular game system, may make it easier to fix and rewrite portions of the sim, but having the game engine combine the modules smoothly with stabability a much more difficult task.

Not necessarily. What is to be optimized, is how they are processed. Like Chivas said, f.e. trying to use multiple cores better.

Or what B6 or Luthier, don`t recall, wrote about the "Texture-Manager", which is obviously part of the engine. They said, in the current release some textures are loaded to slow. So there is something to be optimized with the engine, not the textures themselves.

I thought clouds, smoke, and hit affects are a particle problem not a land or plane texture.

They made a major mistake using Speedtrees. If they had followed the development of DCS (LOMAC etc.) they would have found that out because DCS tested Speedtrees and posted that it was not usable because the performance hit was too high. Also, look at Oblivion, it uses Speedtrees and it stutters also. Speedtrees is just a quick and dirty way to do lots of trees.

They posted that they were still working on the particle system in the patch release.

I agree and have never liked Speedtrees, but at the time, amongst other problems it was the only way they could get the sim to run at more than 1 fps. I much preferred the old tree model in early screenshots, but I see no reason the developers won't be able to further tweak Speedtree to not only look better, but also have a collision model in the future.

Another issue I would like to see fixed is the riverbanks, that were first designed in the terrain model but were never implemented.

The implementation of riverbanks, and replacment of some trees with hedgerows, will completely change the look of COD for the better. I can see this eventually be done by the developer and/or modding community.

Clouds are no longer a big hit on my rig, but I still question the acceleration of unrealistic icing