If your planning to stay in a specific zone for awhile, I find the best thing to do is to tweak your graphic settings for that zone to get a nice balance between visual quality, and enough performance not to irratate you (depending on your preference).
Once you've done this a few times you get a hang of the settings. My favorites to keep up is texture quality (since I get a lot of video ram and regular ram) I try to keep landscape textures at maximum, and character ones at high. I find that even if you sacrafice the effects the game can add, keeping the textures up keeps hte game looking nice. Also if I'm in a flooded area I like to tweak the water settings so that it doesn't look god awful (depending on settings the water can sometiems look malformed, with very odd reflactions and wacky patterns).
To summaerize all my babble, don't just use the quick setting change profiles (when they turn up quality, they do it in leaps and bounds, enabling tons of effects that you don't really need, and which eat up your fps like candy), tweak it for your individual taste.