When a full battle is raging, 6 caps or more, my framerate drops to 7!!!!
Its impossible to hit any small fighter with energy, and sector feels laggy as hell.

Well, there's a lot of stuff going on. Turn down your settings and, hot-damn, your fps will go up. Even I go down to ~40fps when there are a lot of high-poly ships onscreen. That's just the way video cards work.

Turning down your LOD settings (if you haven't already) should help with the framerate issues. I think I remember Incarnate saying that running with them both set to 20 is just short of insane.

Ah yes: http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/1/12753#158398

And the visual difference between LOD7 and LOD 20 is not large IMO:
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/2/12244?page=2#153343

Thanks Moofed. Ill try it.
I was using LOD 7 and other one at 20.

LOL my fps dropped to 2 or so in B12, and it's still bad enough that I can't do serious PvP there (~15), even after reducing everything possible. Oh well.

Yep i tried reducing everything. Still not good. With 4 cappies i get fps around 20 but if there are more cappies and a lot of scrap crates floating my fps drops to 7-10.

I get occasional drops to below 0.5 FPS when big things jump in... It's REALLY annoying when you're fighting someone, and your screen locks up for 4 seconds... if you're not dead when you come out of it, you will be by the time you come out of the next 4 seconds.

2 frames in 8 seconds is horrendous.

Aren't the freezes what Ray was trying avoid with the asset preloading that made VO's memory usage skyrocket for a couple betas?

Possibly. Last I saw him I think he was working on this exact issue.