Hi,

I have been playing since version 2.0 and I can confirm that with the latest 3.5+ lot of things have changed for the good in the game, new features, a lot of fixes and improvements.

The latest 3.5x version has added a FXAA graphic option, I'm eager to see what effect this has on general performance.

with my Quad-Core i7, 3+ GH, 6 GB RAM and a NVidia GeForce 8800 GTS, I have made some personal tweakings in the form of a dedicated NVidia profile, the result was that I got good performance (good for that grafics card) in space, but really *miserable* framerates in FP mode which is: inside space stations when intereacting with NPCs.

After searching for a long time, I have found the decisive tweak for getting good and fluid player handling in FP mode also, and this should be interesting for anyone, even with a ATI card.

For NVidia card owners: It's crucial that the Image Scaling options of your card is set to "Display" and not to "GPU".

Here's how you make sure of this:

Go in your NVidia Control Panel > Display > Adjust desktop and position

Here it should read:

Scaling: Fullscreen

Performing Scaling on: Display

My personal tweakings are here below, I'm  using Nvidia Inspector, but you can simply make a game profile in your NVidia Control Panel.

Profile:

Anisotropic filtering: 2x

Anti-aliasing - FXAA: Off (You can also set this on, but then switch off AA - Mode, will look worser but enhance FPS)

Anti-aliasing - gamma correction: Off

Anti-aliasing - transparency: Off

Anti-aliasing - Mode: 2x (this can be switched Off and FXAA On for better performance but don't set both to On)

Anti-aliasing - Setting: Improve app setting

CUDA - GPU's: All

Multi display: Single monitor performance

Max pre-rendered frames: 2

Ambient occlusion: Not supported

Threaded optimization: On

Power management: Max Performance

Texture filtering - Anisotropic optimization: On

Texture filtering - Quality: Quality (turn it lower for better FPS, but lower quality)

Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias: Clamp

Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization: On

Vertical sync: Off (important)

Triple buffering: Off (important)

In-game settings:

In the grafics options, make these changes:

Vsynch = OFF (if you set it on, you must ALSO set it on in your profile!)

AA = OFF (your profile will overwrite this and AA will be enforced by your card)

Shader quality = Normal

All Shadows = Off  (try turning these on if you don't have FPS problems)

LOD / Field of View = can all be set up to 30 (more with a powerful card)

Gamma: Change it to your satisfaction (I increase it because all these stations are rather dark...)

You should run fine with any 16:9 resolution, start setting the resolution to your native resolution and go down (still chose a 16:9 ratio) until you are satisfied.

I hope all this will help you as it did for me. 😎

Cheers,

XenonS