This happened to me (although not as bad as you I guess) in beta 5 or 6, can't remember which now.

When fighting, when any new weapon or object was used for the first time since I was in-sector, I got a fps low-spike. For example, say I was in B8 and engaged BUNNY. She lined me up and fired flares for the first time, I would get a spike. The first time a swarm was fired, I would get a spike. The first time someone shot Neut 3's, I would get a spike.

It was as if my computer had to scramble to render the object in question, delaying by a half-second or so. But once it was loaded into RAM, no problems. Second, third, subsequent firings of the same weapon - no problems, no spikes.

However, that problem went away with the beta 6 or 7 client (can't remember which now). So I assumed that either the devs fixed it or my problem was due to a bad install. Or gremlins.

Try downloading a completely new client from scratch? Perhaps that would help... (time-consuming, but perhaps worth it.)

Already tried uninstalling and re-installing game from scratch, no luck. It looks like it's only me that's experiencing this though, so I guess i'll just have to get used to it. Thanks for the help though.

Im having same problems. Some sort of lag spikes.
When firing guns I get frozen for a sec from time to time and its not connected to the usual huge number of npc bots in sector lags.
Also some strange fps drops and lag freezes happen to me in station sectors when going for the dock.

Hey I'm not sure if this helps, but someone I know on a windows, while playing Jedi Outast game, he gets 'fps attacks' where the same thing that happens to you (from what I can tell) happens to him every couple of minutes. He still doesn't know the cause, but you must have the same computer thing as him. Maybe its a virus?

Scanned, my comp is clean. If it was a virus it would probably affect other games too though, and Vendetta is the only one I experience problems with.

How often are the spikes? more than once a second or less than?

Try disabling sound to see if that helps.
(after the updater runs, move the cwavsound.dll file from the drivers directory to somewhere else.

This may be irrelevant, but on my mac, I also noticed a drop in framerates around beta 7 or 8 or so, which persisted to 1.5.4. Separate from these lowered framrates, I will sometimes get fps drop spikes in combat - but its usually related to a convoy jumping into a sector or passing by in the distance.

Herm, that's intresting I run on high graphic detail, maximum backround and stuff on my 800mhz and I almost never get a FPS drop, even with the convoy (lag however, I do get)

I have some serious FPS issues as well. After a playing a while, I get FPS drop-offs every time something happens (bots exploding, weapons firing, getting hit, closing a diologue, entering a sector, new lines in chat, etc...) It seems to get progressively worse the longer the client runs, until it's so choppy that it's unplayable, and I need to restart the client. (at this point, the FPS seems to be effecting more than my viewpoint, as I start getting hit by bots while in roll maneuvers that normally keep them off me - It's like both my client and ship are bogged down)

There are a few odd things about that though...

First off, when it starts getting really bad - choppy and stays that way, (maybe 2 to 4 FPS) my FPS counter goes up to read 50 or 70FPS (which it obviously isn't) so I can't get an accurate guage of the framerate.

Secondly, the framerate starts to decline at a grossly accelerated rate if I'm part of a combat mission. In fact, if I'm in a group Border Patrol or Adv Combat mission, my framerate starts declining quickly, even if I'm not part of the action (in a station, or off doing something else while my group fights)

@Ray:

Spikes occur about every half-second to every second. Thus my FPS graph looks like a seismograph during an earthquake.

And there's absolutely nothing else running on your machine, like IM or an email client that polls?

I have exactly the same problem as cunjo. On linux here though.

Ray, have you tried running the client and just letting it mine automatically for an hour or two? That is pretty much my scenario. (but not automatically)

Nothing else running. Checked task manager as well as task bar, nothing.

I shut down every nonessential process excepting TS before playing vendetta, so there's absolutely nothing that could be bogging it down.

I took some video captures that accurately show what I was running into, unfortunately, they're still awaiting approval on google video. Does anyone have an alternate (temporary) host?

I have the bandwidth, but not amazingly large amounts of disk space. How big is it?

Hi, I went mining the other day, and my FPS dropped down to the single digits EVERY TIME I finished harvesting a unit of ore from a roid. The resulting jerkiness and control difficulty gave me a huge headache unless I just sat perfectly still during harvesting. I also experienced FPS drops whenever I moved far enough away from a roid to exceed the max mining distance.

The effect was greater the more ore that was being brought in at once (i.e., if I raked in four units simultaneously, it would drop lower and for longer than with two, or even one) or if my hold was filled at the same time.

It seemed that basically any time that my client echoed something back at me in chat/mission, the FPS dropped.

TC:

They're not that big... two of them at just over 10MB each (managed to recompress to XviD)

I would need to either break them apart with WinRAR to send via email, or find another way of sending them though, since they are over 10MB.

I've been having some really annoying FPS spikes in the new client when interacting with the station interface.

Pretty much, if I click on anything (action buttons in particular) that has to do with my ship(s), cargo, or stored items, the game locks up (mouse stops working, keyboard input stops working) for anywhere from 5 to 10 seconds and resumes normal play.

My initial reaction was "Oh, it's just lag of some sort", but when I checked my ping (around 50-100 average, depends on the time of day) I decided it wasn't lag. /fps doesn't show a drop in FPS while these freezes occur.''

This happens on both my desktop and laptop.

Laptop is a 1.2GHz G4 iBook with 512MB RAM running OSX 10.4.5. The laptop has a shader/rglow-compatible vid card, but tends to overheat if rglow is on even with other settings put to minimum.
Desktop is a 800MHz G4 iLamp (iMac) with 256MB RAM running OSX 10.4.6. Not shader/rglow-compatible.

"I've been having some really annoying FPS spikes in the new client when interacting with the station interface.

Pretty much, if I click on anything (action buttons in particular) that has to do with my ship(s), cargo, or stored items, the game locks up (mouse stops working, keyboard input stops working) for anywhere from 5 to 10 seconds and resumes normal play.

My initial reaction was "Oh, it's just lag of some sort", but when I checked my ping (around 50-100 average, depends on the time of day) I decided it wasn't lag. /fps doesn't show a drop in FPS while these freezes occur.''"

This happens to me too, though I neglected to mention it, since it's less detrimental to actual gameplay than the in-flight lockups.

MsKanaka, if you do it enough times, you might notice the FPS counter drop (watching carefully) thing is, that when the framerate suddenly locks up like that, it stays displaying the famerate from before until the screen updates again (and if it picks up again smoothly after that, you often won't even see it)

P.S., I'm running Windows, so it's definately not a Mac thing.

So I'm not the only one having this prob. I'd always thought it was a ISP or background proccess issue or too much caffiene, because my ping was good.

I've always just tried to wait it out, or restarted the client.