Your biggest performance drain are in this order:
AI
Post effects (Bloom, particularly)
Draw distance (specifically camera distance).
Texture depth/quality
Your biggest performance tweaks therefore are:
Intelligently using AI (I use a manual lua based distance check to keep them extremely short range)
Disabling bloom entirely as well as all other post effects
Optimizing draw distance for your hardware (specifically using the camera distance slider).
Making sure occlusion is set to 100 (to ensure entities are properly being excluded from view, it generally results in a 5% performance boost by my tests).
Set terrain shader, entity shader, grass shader to low. Medium is generally about the same but if you're really struggling this will help as well.
Using these settings I can get a 2.8 ghz dual core intel chip running no 3d video card (my son's school pc) doing software emulation to around 12-20fps regularly.
There are other tweaks of course, but this should impact your regular day to day stuff the most.