i'd register and see if anybody here can help me:
i'm experiencing what i would describe as pretty bad performance during the
game. I have tried various tweaks like setting an fps limit, turning off the
background clouds and turning down the background stars. I've also played with
turning off one of my displays, tweaking the process affinity and priority and
i've tried the various compatability settings in windows. I've upgraded my
drivers checked running processes and so on.
None of it helped much
I suspect there to be a problem with the way the game draws the screen - i've
read that there are problems with 2d acceleration in windows 7 (gdi/gdi+ problems)
especially when compared to windows xp.
I've noticed that the bad performance i'm experiencing does not seem to originate
from a lot of activity in game (lots of calculations from fighting etc.) since
it makes almost no difference whether the game is paused or not. What does make
a difference is what actually is on screen - i can have very smooth performance when
looking at an empty region of space or if i zoom in in certain location. That is
the case even when the game is running at 4x with lots of activity elsewhere.
What especially seems to drag down performance are the various overlays - i
documented an extreme case with the following two screenshots:
game is running paused - to the right is my second display with the current cpu
usage. note that there is an 10 fps limit active here.
only difference here is that i've enabled the vectors for the civilian ships.
100% cpu usage on core 4 while still paused and limited at 10 fps!
You can imaging when lots of stuff is happening and there are multiple things
like that being drawn on screen my fps takes a nosedive.
Is this normal? is there anything i can do to remedy it?
i'm running the latest beta (although this problem existed with versions before.
here is my dxdiag for the specs.
edit:
after experimenting a bit more i've come to the conclusion that the problem is
not with those vectors per se - just with certain instances of them at certain
zoom levels. that might also apply to other similar problems causing slowdown.
i tried scrolling around a little bit at the same zoom level and as soon as a
bit of the bottom vector comes into view the fps plummet. i zoom out a little
bit and the fps get slightly better.
There are other instances of vectors that are just fine fps-wise at any zoom
level and further still there are certain locations that for some reason show
the same kind of fps drop even if there is nothing visible on screen.
i have uploaded the samegame for the above screenshots to the ftp.