From my xfire profile:

..It's a decent system, and I have no major complaints. I can think of a lot of stuff I can upgrade, but my budget's pretty tight right now and not a lot of room for buying new parts.

I haven't tried playing on mendium maps, so I dunno how well it performs there.

Looking at your specs: You do need to upgrade Vista. It's a service pack 2 now. Also, check nVidia's website for driver upgrades.

That service pack is available for quite a while now. I'm running Vista Ultimate 64bit and got SP2 too long ago to remember. Maybe there's something wrong with your update settings?

It's really only using one of the four cores, that's why my system is so much idle and has enough power to run other apps without further slowdowns. I can even keep task manager open on the second screen to see that while playing

Typically, the game only runs on core 2 which is almost always at 100%, while the other cores are idle. The performance issue is so bad for me that mouse clicks register mouse down at different buttons than mouse up and thus lead to constant errors unless I do not move the mouse at all during the multi-second time the game needs to respond to a click. Horrible. In the beginning, the game runs nicely fast, but especially while playing advent, sometime into the game it becomes slower and slower. Even after ending the game, while sins still runs, it's user interface doesn't react any better, which is REALLY strange.

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I did reduce settings, without effect. It's dependend upon map size (appearing only later in the game!), but not upon the amount or size of enemy fleets, as it's even slow after eradicating all of them. I've got 8GiB installed and Sins is using a little bit over 1.4 GiB in these situations, which I believe is pretty much the maximum memory consumption possible for 32bit games under Vista.

I very much have the impression that the building of the large race dependend guns is somewhat linked to this problem. The more of them exist, the more extreme the slowdown has been on all occasions. However, that might have been a coincidence, but even with the same empire size, the slowdown increased when I did build them and enabled auto-fire.

I doubt that it's bad RAM. Except a few "IRQL not less or equal" bluescreens, obviously from a faulty driver after system reinstall (problem is gone now for longer than I have Sins installed!) there never was a problem. I've also had no problems with graphics intense stuff like Crysis Warhead which also uses a similar amount of memory and surely can be expected to be much more hardware demanding - but there was no slowdown there.

Another point to look at might be my installation via the internet: At first I had installed from DVD, but that one was german only (and although that's my mother tongue, I had much problems understanding it), so I uninstalled that and reinstalled from the internet. I did not notice such slowdowns with the version installed from DVD, but I was only playing small maps with TEC, while I now prefer medium-large and Advent, which is leading to a much more immense slowdown than playing Vasari or TEC on the same map size. Advent comes typically with much more fighters and bombers, but those should not really be a problem when there's no action going on.

I just googled up this page...looks good IIRC I got SP2 via a link from german tech news site heise to a M$ page. Since my installation was switched to english from german, I could update early. After the update, all the language packs were gone for a while, nothing which bothered me. Some weeks later they appeared back under download options, not that I need them anyway - I prefer english for computer systems.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=656C9D4A-55EC-4972-A0D7-B1A6FEDF51A7&displaylang=en

For 32 bit users with the same problem, this one might be interesting:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a4dd31d5-f907-4406-9012-a5c3199ea2b3&displaylang=en

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Brand:Gateway FX530 XL (Yes, I got this when they still custum built PC's)
Stock Motherboard
Intel core 2 extreme runnng at stock 2.9ghz
Win xp service pack 3
4 gigs of ram(2x2gig pieces)
2 ATI Radeon x1950's running in Crossfire at 1920x1200


Just out of curiousity, how many planets do your games have on average? I usually have 600-1200 min/max with graphics maxed and ten players with no less then eleven systems with no lag until every player has maxed fleets, and even then it's still playable.

The thing is that Sins wasn't build to accomadate people with insane computer system, most the game uses is 2gb