Just wondering, do you have 10-15 fps at the begining (like less than 20 ships + 1-2 planets)

My system is terribly bad compared to yours, but it can pull out 10-15 fps at late and 50 at start on highest :?

AMD 64x2 4200+ (overclocked till 3 Ghz )

Geforce 8500 GT

Might be wrong, but I think sins need CPU more than great VGA :/

(If you zoom out, there ain't exactly much to render)

one of your problems is u have too many programs running in the back ground turn off what u do not use or need it will free up a lot of ram and cpu if u have vista and do not want to take a chance u will mess something up go to pcworld.com down load vista service optimizer it is very easy to use. it will do every thing for u if u have xp get xp tweeker from the site as well u will notice after running program that your comp is a lot faster uses a lot less ram and cpu. one more thing i do not know if u have a dual or quad core comp here is a symple tweek to increse preformance go to run type in msconfig go to advanced then boot at the top u will see processors and ram set processors at how ever many u have and do the same for ram the rason is anyone comp uses the min amount of processor  and ram one or more processors is allways set to run at half this will configure the processors to be able to run at max from go and will improve speed the same goes for ram 20% of ram is not used by defalt it will now be able to use all of the ram i know in preformance logs it can say u are useing all of the ram but that is just what the comp has alocated - the 20% that it willl not use do to defalt is not counted this will change when u make the changes in msconfig this gets rid of one big bottle neck so i know i am long winded and can go on for a long time on how to tweek a comp for max preformance. so i will end this now later.

one more thing defrag your comp also the reg my need to be cleaned up and defraged u can us this it is free for 15 days but u only need to use it one time every 3 to 4 months it is auslogicts boostspeed it is very good program and offers a lot of tweeks and speed up opions well later time to see what else i can find on the net

Sins (if i'm not mistaken) is not multithreaded, so it does not take advantage of multiple cores very well. If sins is running on one core and maxing it out then the game will crawl. You can set the core affinity of processes with the task manager and move sins to a core with less activity on it and see if that helps things.

What you can also try is defragmenting your hard drive, the sins menu always stutters for me if i get lazy with my defrags.

Lastly, you can lower all the graphical settings and see if the frame rate is still as bad.

Ok, i hope that helps.

Good luck!  

lloyd: Take a bit of time to format you posts, please?

In some games, there may be some features (often shadows) that may be pushed onto the CPU rather than the GPU. It often helps to set the game to the bare minimum settings and slowly turn up the settings until it slows down, so you can figure out what setting(s) is causing the trouble.

The best thing to do is to find the bottleneck. Find that one resource that is maxed out. You mentioned that the CPU is at 30%, and you're running a quad core system - open Task Manager and check the individual cores - if one is maxed and the others aren't, then that's your problem.

Captain and Screet: It's entirely possible for something to be multithreaded, yet to have one thread take up more CPU than the other threads. Being able to use multiple cores doens't always mean you use them equally.

This is an odd problem, though - if he's running at 3.2 GHz, then that should be more than plenty even with a single core.