fraps is the answer..
No matter what game you fraps you always geta decrease in performance, well you did when i used to use it on Counter Strike.

You can easily shave 15-20FPS off what you would expect to get if you use fraps.

bleh fourms going crazy for me today, didn't finish my thought.... With one core slammed there may just not be enough CPU to do a proper FRAPS

FRAPS works fine on my machine and it's nearly identical to yours.

Sounds like your computer is bottlenecked. Somewhere there's a part not catching up to the others. Possible culprits could be your RAM frequency or motherboard, so more information about those would be nice.

I myself have:

Pentium 4 "Prescott" 630 @ 3.0ghz
2gb DDR2 RAM @ 667mhz
XFX nVidia GeForce 7600GS 256mb
160gb SATA2 harddrive
Onboard 7.1 Audio
MSI P4N SLI motherboard (800mhz FSB, SATA2, DDR2, PCI-E 16x SLI)
550W OEM PSU.
Samsung SyncMaster 226BW 22" monitor @ 1680x1050
This system is configured to run at pretty much 1:1 ratios between everything, it's incredibly well balanced, and that lets me run Sins with everything at highest settings with 4x AA at 1680x1050 stable at 30FPS.

It is a very common mistake by most system builders to not balance their systems adequatly, they just go for the parts they know are good, and throw in a motherboard and a few sticks of RAM that they think are good, creating numourous bottlenecks that slow down their performance so much it's not even funny.

You could try a system cleanup, remove tsr's (msconfig) do a defrag, scandisk, run regscrub, all the usual stuff.

Is your ram actually running at specified speed, and the timming are at there optimal (Check overclock forums for your model, delivered ram is not always as specified on there site)

I am running a slightly better system but get no issues, i am running sins in window mode 1280*1024 everything on max, with irc, msn, ie and some other hogging programs (Steam, xfire) and not getting one issue on large scale battle son huge map max players.

Asus P5K Premium Wi-Fi (Intel P35 - 1333 FSB Conroe/Penryn)
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz (4 CPUs)- Running at 3.4ghz per core
OCZ DDR2-1150 2x1024MB FlexXLC Edition Dual Channel Kit - Running at 5-5-5-15 (5-5-5-18 stock)
2 x 320Gb Samsung SpinPoint T166 HD321KJ 7200 16mb Cache SATA II Raid0
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX
Sound Card: Creative 7.1 X-FI ExtremeGamer Fatal1ty
Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_gdr.070227-2254)


I am running my nvidia card on the previous drivers to what you have 169.21 you could try un-installing your drivers and putting the older ones on if you havnt tried that.

Amount of units and AI.

Oh, and malice is bugged at the moment. It brings every computer to a screeching halt when used on large fleets. But that isn't your problem, I guess.

Wow, sorry to hear about your problem. I am not experiencing this problem and I dont have as powerful a computer as you. I can run sins with everything on high(except bloom) and I run it in a window. I'm usually getting 30-40 fps(except when info pops up, then it drops to about 20)

Inspiron E1505
1.83GHZ Centrino duo processor
2GB Ram
Nvidia GeForce go 7300 with TurboCache
Windows Vista Home Premium

I dont have any noticable increase in FPS when I lower quality. As I said - thats CPU, not video issue.

It doesnt solve the whole thigs, but it definitely improves FSP. But its pretty hard to play without UI.

It's true that using multiple cores would help a lot, but...

I think this is just a problem of huge games being too hard for nearly any computer. The issue is related to how large a game are you loading (and how far zoomed in?)? I've played this game smoothly on my old computer (an old AMD 2200+, the bare minimum at 1.8ghz), and I've bogged down my brand new computer (intel q6600 OC'ed to 3.0 ghz, 4gb 1066, nice HD, 8800GT 512mb,--5.9 windows indexes across the board) on larger games. Once you get up to over 1000 fleet points per player, it's just too much, even for newer systems. It just slows down a bit when all the ships are in motion.

The thing is that a large game with many times more ships in play simply requires many times more processing power to keep track of. Unfortunately, processors have not really come all that far in the last 5 years, and my new computer isn't necessarily 100x faster than my old.

I mean really, how much faster do you think my brand new 2.4ghz quad OC'ed to 3.0 is than my original 1.8ghz cpu? Realistically the difference is obviously larger than the .6ghz frequency speed increase, but it's not THAT much larger. And certainly the fact that it's a quad barely helps at all...

What I'm saying is that I think we should be complaining to Intel for not making any significant breakthroughs in CPU technology, not Ironclad. IMO, putting multiple cores in a single die instead of simply making the CPUs faster is a BS way to "advance" techonlogy.

Overall I think huge long games are boring anyway. I'd rather just play a quick short game. I wish this game was smaller!

On single core cpu load up to 100%
With modern high speed two core cpu loads are at 25-75% per core.

Game much consumes video memory at different graphic settings.
So use for example rivatuner to monitor gpu memory during gameplay.

Much depends of map sizes and ai players could stuck in somehow.

Sometimes setting higher graphic quality with no AA and lower screen resolution runs at 30-40 fps against 10-20 in large games and up to 100 fps at amall and medium maps.

So all depends on settings and exact PC ware.

...and here it is again...sigh...

The performace drop bug is NOT caused by the amount of units or anything like this. It's already there at the very beginning of a game, and even in the game menu. Believe me it's interface related, or ask anyone who got the bug, what happens to their FPS if they hover over a ship and it's infobox appears? FPS will drop to half. As well in the main menu, where there are more text and buttons, FPS is a lot worse.
And hell what detail should we give about our pc? I did give all the details about it, in another thread about this bug a lot earlyer. What can they do with it? I heard from many guys that they can play perfectly with 30-40 FPS with an old 9800Pro... Well i do have that card in my older PC and it's not able to go over 20FPS, no matter what settings i use at all. So the same hardware seems to do just great for one, and seems to fail for others (ohh my card is not a made by the nightbour-peasant thing, it's BBA). When i monitor the CPU usage, it's alrady 100% in the main menu, ehh... Ohh yeah, the CPU is a 2,4GHz P4 with 1GB dual channel 400MHz RAM's.
The PC has no problems at all, it runs all the other games just fine... 3DMark03 defaults ~7k points, company of heroes Low-Med settings, benchmark, over 25-30 average fps and so on. And anyways it's above the minimum requirements.
Maybe thousands of ships and hundreds of planets could cause a slowdown, but when you have a single planet, a shipyard and 2 construction vessels with 18-20FPS as soon as an infobox opens... well that's sad.
I've been trying it with old Catalyst's (maybe. 7.2 it was) and also tryed with the newest... It doesn't change anything.
I tryed to switch v-sync and all the graphical settings, but they don't help either.
I updated DirectX and even my chipset drivers (ohh it's an Abit IS7, afaik intel chipset is one of the best, especially for an intel CPU), i've updated everything, but nothing changed at all.

I ran out of ideas, and i'm not a PC-noob just am not a programmer. Believe me it's not my PC, it's a silly little hideous bug, wich is in my opinion strongly related to game interface.
Many people have it...