Okay. Initially, after upgrading to 10.3.5 from 10.3.4, I was pretty ecstatic about performance. It seemed that the new drivers had really done the trick. I wasn't dropping below 40 fps while buzzing the Corvus station.

For the most part this is true, but after finally visiting the NT Senate sector in the Dau system I realized that it's still an issue. I haven't explored the new universe too throughly, but so far that sector is the most like the old sector 9 in terms of a combination of a complex station and a high asteroid count. I was getting 16 fps there.

Keep in mind that I was running in windowed mode with all settings maxed and two displays on. If I went full screen (and I will soon for testing) I'd expect better results.

It seems that perhaps the "recommended" Mac settings will need to have doshaders=off. They're certainly not essential to gameplay. The way in which this is presented to the public will have to be determined by the devs. Clearly some players will know all about driver issues between Apple, ATI and nVidia, but others might be upset that their DirectX-using buddies have better eye candy...

Asp

Asp, I'm pretty sure this is the old bug that comes up after loading too many sectors (though it seems to be a lot better you can load tons before it happens), but if you restart vendetta you should be back to normal. I've been in the senate sector, and though I didn't have duel displays going everything else was the same as your set up (I had shaders and rglow on, windowed, anti aliased, maxed settings) and I didn't drop under 40 fps anywhere except after playing for a while and loading many sectors.