Uh, 40% of those systems are DX10 video cards and of the top DX10 GPUs nearly all of them are relatively high-end save the 8600 series. Even the top DX9 SM 2.0/3.0 series, the 7600, is decently powerful. Roughly 39% of people have 512MB VRAM, which indicates that the majority of people are using cards manufactured at or past the 7xxx series as well, since 512MB of VRAM was a gimmick up until the 8xxx series. This doesn't even include the fact that those using Steam are disproportionately playing Source games which have low system requirements, and cheap, powerful midrange video cards have been $100 or less for the last two years. What exactly are you arguing?

Yeah.

For me, the game doesn't seem to degrade in fps during battles. Rather, as the game progresses, the overall fps just slowly deteriorates, but remains constant. The game will start at 60fps (I think it is Vsynched. Makasuro, I'd be interested to know how you pushed the fps so high. I didn't see a synch setting in the options) But as the game builds, it usually drops to 10-15 and remains there for the rest of the game. I've noted that the performance also seems directly related to the number of AI players...therefore I am assuming the number of total units and how much number crunching the system is doing to calculate all those unit's movements.

Again, I don't think the game is as GPU sensitive as CPU. Anyhow, I am going to upgrade my CPU and see what that does. Unfortunately, I haven't seen anybody on the forum be able to dramatically change their framerate in this game through tweaks or tricks. I think I'm just stuck with what I have. I just updated to Win 7 hoping for a fps boost. Ended up not changing anything. Rates were about the same.

Cheers,

I didn't realize you could set it for grav well only. Is that in the regular settings?

I have this issue as well and across 2 different higher-end systems. When the game heats up and there are tons of ships on all sides on large maps with max players and many planets, the frame rates drop through the floor. I have yet to meet a game (except sins) that i cannot run graphics maxed out. It's simply the sheer amount of items the game must keep track of thats causing this issue. Couple that with the games inability to use multi cores and possibly UI issues.

I have read this thread and see that some people with half the system specs as mine are able to run without any frame rate issues at all. I would guess these fellers are all running in windowed mode with AA off, or are actually employees lol.

Pentium dual core e6500 @ 3.5 ghz overclocked and married to

asus p5ql mainboard cooled with

cooling tower with 6 heat pipes fed directly from outside the case via ducting

4 gig  matched brand ram running dual channel (3328 actual due to 32 bit os xp)

ati hd 5700 1 gig ram pcie

650 watt psu

sound blaster live!

2.5 TB hard disk space total

As you can see......my system is big enough to where i shouldn't be having these issues with this game. Go ahead and blame it on a bottle neck or keep slinging around the word noob. It just goes to show how much you actually know

Game needs fixed...nuff sed