I'm happy to report that using the DirectX 9.0 driver with a GeForce FX 5600 and looking at a Levi gives <4fps. The same scene in DirectX 8.1 gives something in the 30fps range (lots of ships about). So clearly the problem lies with your new Pixel Shader 2.0 effects. My question is: will this bug persist in the new ship normal+specular maps? If so, bah!

Meanwhile, just turn your texture settings down so the pixel shaders are disabled.

Why? Just switching to DirectX 8.1 fixes the problem. I'm just curious as to whether this bug will make it impossible for me to use the specular and normal mapped textures.

Meanwhile, Doom3 and HL2 play with an always greater than 30fps frame rate. So it's obviously not a card-level problem.

I have a 5600 card in my machine at work and it doesn't get 4fps.
Try uninstalling the video drivers and reinstalling them.

Turning down the texture settings does not disable the pixel shaders. To disable the pixel shaders in directx requires you to edit the config.ini file at this time.

If all else fails, try switching to OpenGL mode. That will give you all the maximum eye-candy, just like dx9.0. Dx8.1 doesn't have a couple of the features that VO uses, but the loss of the features aren't very noticable.

Here's the numbers from the current leviathan sector (G-1):

DirectX 9.0: 4.1fps
DirectX 8.1: 27.7fps
OpenGL: 21.0fps

No other settings were changed.

Selected Settings:
Resolution: 1024x768 32bpp
Texture Depth: 32 bits
Texture Resolution: Very High
Antialiasing mode: 3 (DX9) / 2x (DX8)
MipMap Filtering: Trilinear
Texture filtering: Anistropic
Illumination/Bump/Environment Maps: On
Multipass Rendering: On
Texture Compression: Off
Scene LOD: 20
Distance LOD: 10
rglow: on

System Details
AMD Athlon XP 2800+
1GB DDR333 RAM
nVidia GeForce FX 5600 128MB
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition

Experiments:
* Turning off Multipass rendering lowers all fps numbers considerably, with dx9 going down to 2.5fps.
* Turning off rglow increases performance by approx 30-40% across the board.
* Setting Texture resolution to High (Multipass on) yields a 660% increase in fps in DirectX9 mode, and a substantially smaller increase in other modes. Also, DX9 AA+High texture quality makes textures very blurry. Also, this improves fps in non-levi sectors by <30% (0% while looking at a station in DX9)

PS: OpenGL rather lacks eye-candy like, say, antialiasing, anistropic texture filtering, or environment maps (IceYo!s)

Thoughts?