The biggest thing I see that causes poor performance is the overly aggressive use of Anti-Aliasing.
Unless you are building and rendering CG in Flame, it is very likely that you don’t need Anti-Aliasing at all. Rather, you need to actually understand the Surface Filtering algorithms and FILTER YOUR SHIT properly. I see it all the time…screen comps with Anti-Aliasing jacked all the way up when EWA + Linear and a 2 pixel blur and crop softness set to 4 is all you need.
Plus, Anti Aliasing softens every surface. Boo.