These asteroids, the light gray lumpy ones that are rounded at the edges, that some people call 'bone' roids, which are usually Carbonic Silicate and sometimes Vanazek, seem to be implicated in a number of FPS destroying problems. Especially when they are in a very very dense cluster, usually in unmarked sectors like Pherona P16. I have also seen problems at Azek D11, when the station and asteroids are both being rendered at once.

IRS said on 100 that at Artana Aquilus N3 he has a drop.. and its CSV roids, station, and planet there.

Anyone else notice this as a pattern?

Yes, the superdense CSV roid field in Divinia I1 take my fps from 85+ (vsync) into the teens atleast. They're the best looking roids but they come at a price it seems.

Given a choice I'd keep them as is since they make up for some of the less impressive ones.

[edit]
System specs:
2400+ Athlonxp
768 megs ram
GeForce4Ti 4400 128 meg
Gentoo Linux, 2.6.10 kernel

Max VO settings + some fsaa, aniso. filtering, and vsync

i've also had this problem everytime i encounter those roids in intiros <spelling?> in either case it becomes a royal pain to dock at stations with those behind it.

<edit>
mac os 10.3.7
beige powermac g3/1ghz processor
32 meg radeon 7500 video card
768megs of ram
running on USA standard 110v electricity. :)

ok, maybe a little too detailed hehehe :D

Some details on your gaming rigs and O/S might be helpful. :-)

AMD Sempron 2800
512 DDR
GeForce2 MX400 (64 megs vidio RAM)
Onboard network and audio
Win98SE, only other tasks were a browser, firewall, and virus checker.

I usually run around 90-140 FPS in the game, but in AA N-3 it was knocked down to only 4-10 FPS. This would happen only when certain conditions were met:

1) Station in view, at a high LOD...
2) Planet in view, and...
3) Asteroids in view

The problem only happens when all three are present in my field of view. I did notice that distance from the station was a factor- when I got far enough away from the station, the framerate jumped back to a normal level. I suspect that the LOD scaling had kicked in at the point, taking away a level of detail from the station (or from the fighters around the station).

This seems like a texture issue, as I recall hearing something similar to this that was solved simply by lowering the texture quality. At some point, the number of textures used must have overloaded the graphic card's memory, forcing it to resort to regular system RAM. This would account for the slowdown, and that no other bit of information appeared to change signifigantly in the /fps information.

You're right IRS, it's a texture issue. The "bone" roids each have a unique (high-res) texture map and bump map, while all the other types share generic textures. This means more texture memory in sectors with bone roids, plus more memory for the stations, and that's filling up your texture memory.

So turn down your texture resolution (or turn on texture compression). Or, if enough people are having this problem, I'll go through and make sure sectors with stations don't also have those roids.

Is there a way to automatically switch texture resolution when the FPS drops to a certain level? Especially without reloading all textures?

Edit: Perhaps replacing it with a generic white or grey-blue texture, but keeping the bump map for some stab at realism.

Much as I would like to solve the problem, I'd rather it not be though dumbing down the bone roids. I like the way they look, even if there is a slowdown, especially the hollow ones (heh, those are fun to fly through). I'll try texture compression and see how much of an impact it has.

However, I do like ctishman's idea of auto-switching settings. Prehaps a dynamic LOD setting that adjusts itself upwards and downwards as needed to maintain a minimum FPS? It ought to be an option.

Switching from very high to high textures solved this problem for me. G4 Powerbook, 1.25 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 64 VRAM, OS 10.3.

Broma-ba Slick

That would because the Very High textureset requires more than 64MB of VRAM. At least, it used to.

Very High runs fine on my GeForce 2 MX 32MB, but terribly on my Radeon 9600 Pro 64MB. How odd.
-:sigma.SB

Might be OS dependant...

Probably because the gf2mx doesn't support shaders and therefore doesn't load some extra textures that the shaders use. But I'm not sure that would account for 32megs worth of textures, though.