I think you mangled the link? It's not pointing to what post you mean?
I'll have a look, thanks - as for 3DMark I uninstalled it after not being able to get it to work, for some reason the webpage afterwards only showed basic specs about my PC not about the actual tests after it all finished, and the saved PCR file seems to be a zip with some fairly incomprehensible to the naked eye XML files
About half the distance of the beach visible from the start, it's kind hard to describe since the view changes perspective a lot, and I've never got the hang of judging distance in a game in real measurements. But yeah, they appear closer than I thought they would, and other people don't seem to get it, so not sure what's wrong. Also like I said on that techsupportforum thread in the game for some reason I'm restricted to having the Objects Quality to a maximum of "High", maybe this is related - though in the benchmark it works with "Very High"