The new effects for storms and missiles MURDER my framerate.

To put this in perspective, with quality turned all the way up on highest, I get between 25 and 30FPS in regular flight. With it turned all the way down to low/lowest, I get closer to 45/50 FPS in regular flight.

in either high or low mode, one flight of swarm missiles cuts my framerate in HALF. Even on the lowest setting, a full load of swarms unleashed brings me down to 2-3 FPS, and I lag to death. At one point today, I was dive-bombing a Teradon in B-12, and my framerate dropped to below 1 FPS. When the screen un-froze, I was back in the station.

Ion storms are another issue. It doesn't matter what quality I have it set to, I get the same 10-14 FPS in storms.

There needs to be an option to turn off the most graphics-intensive effects entirely, or people are going to start using spam as a framerate weapon against people with lower graphics cards. No trails for swarms or rockets, and cut all of the particle effects in the storms while reducing the visibility variance thresholds if that will do any good. Just find a way to make the game playable for people with processing limitations.

I agree with cunjo. New effects are framerate killers.
As I am playing on an old G4 powerbook 1GHz/64MB NVidia video card, to get a decent framerate i have to set graphics options to the lowest settings.
Before new effects and with my setting i got framerates around 45/50 but now.... if someone shoots swarms at me I'm as good as dead, my framerate drops to 1 and my ship stands still.

So far, I haven't had problems, and my computer is even crappier than bojansplash's... namely the little brother of his. Go figure. Then again, I have almost everything on lowest anyway, so I might not be a good reference.

Bojan: I don't know how much it'd help, but have you tried running from swarms? (Being perfectly serious here.) If they're not visible they shouldn't affect your framerate too much, if at all.

I'd like for each of the different types of effects (storms/fog, explosions, space junk, energy weapons, missile/rocket trails) to have their own setting in the options menu. At the moment, turning down the effects detail affects *everything*. At the very least, "space junk" shouldn't be tied to storm fog.

Can't you just turn the effects detail lower?

I have effects detail set to low. If I turn them off completely....i wouldnt be able to see even energy shots coming at me.

Strangest thing for me is swarms will kill my framerate while I have 1.5GB of RAM and a radeon X600 vid card. And it still kills it even when I'm not facing them. I've been in dogfights numerous times where all of a sudden my framerate drops drastically. I start looking around and sure enough, swarms are somewhere in the sector.

Just a thought, and I am not an expert in graphics details by any means.

If the missiles that you can't see cause the problem, maybe it has little to nothing to do with the images, but more to do with how many things the game has to keep track of, and it is killing the client in general, and not graphics in specific.

ghost, your fps will be unaffected regardless of the amount of memory your system has. what really counts is the amount of memory your vid card has and how good it can process that.

i absolutely adore the effects for they bring somewhat renewed graphics quality in the game but i do understand some more control might be required to tone it down for lesser hardware. i'm blessed with a recent machine but i remember my previous one was getting choppy.

my worse problem right now is latency. border skirmish is not fun at all atm and i'll see about upping my cable modem subscription. but even that's not guaranteed to help.

I have yet to see the effect on my framerate when a full load of swarms are entirely behind me, however I have noticed that if I fire a volley while turboing ahead, and I pass by the swarms so they're off my screen, my framerate remains choppy. Perhaps the devs can shed some light on where the issue lies, be it in graphics processing or just object tracking... I should hope it's not the latter.

Also as Bojan says, if I turn it any lower, energy is invisible, and that is... bad.

Perhaps at the very least the options should be changed so that when effects details are on low, the swarm effects should be OFF.

Storms are fine for me, however swarms create a noticable framerate hit.

PowerBook G4
GeForce FX Go5200

The trails do look damn cool but an option to turn them off would be nice.

single digit or lower frame rates are not fun.

I have the same problem as Cunjo. It's my crappy graphics card. I know. I get the same sub-1 fps upon multiple swarms.

I can't wait for my 8800GS card... schweet!

Okay, I think it would just be perfectly fine if there was just a new option in graphics to turn off the swarm tails. I thought I heard that had been done somewhere so I expected it, and it turns out I couldn't find one specifically for the swarms, and that made me go "WTF" in my brain... WTF

What we did do was actually tie effects detail to the number of particle emitted, again, so it should reduce the total number of particles and make things faster.

However, I'm not sure what the percentage is.. we can probably fiddle with that. Ie, instead of having 4/5ths the number of particles for a given effects detail setting, drop it to 1/3, or something along those lines. (I have no idea what the current fraction is).

There are also some other optimizations we need to try. Anyway, we'll look into this. Always kind of a crummy balancing act.. making things look cool, versus trying not to slow everyone down :(.

I regulary get 200-300 fps in a normal sector. When someone spams swarms, my rate drops to a mind stuttering 3-10fps. Thanks for addressing it Incarnate.

Low effects setting should actually just turn the trails effects off, in my opinion. Gotta bump up to medium to see swarm trails.

That would be my preference too, Leebs.

Interesting. I've always had problems with all the 'classic' framerate munchers, so all my setting are in the low-ish range. The new swarm trails cause me no problem.

I think it's really a matter of graphics cards, Will. Mine sucks but I'm taking my first tenative steps towards PC-land with purchasing the case and the motherboard TODAY, other items will have to come after I get my tax refund!

I WILL have the nVidia GeForce 8800 GS 320 MB card.. Oh yes, it will be mine... my.. PRECIOUSSSsssssss!