OK, i installed FRAPS today, not sure, how much can i believe the framerates it shows, but it seems to be working, i mean, it shows lower numbers, whet it gets choppy, so...
i fired up my save, where its just me and my Vasari Rebel AI ally + pirates still alive at the end of the game, with enemy AIs wiped out completely, both me and him with almost full fleets...
at 1920x1200, highest settings for both structures and ships and their extra stuff, both bump at medium, shadows at medium, debris and camera shake on, 2xAA, 2AF:
the game is almost stable 60 FPS for me, i can rotate around big enemy fleet, zoom in and out and its stable 60 FPS... however, when those blue arrows appear, sending ships to phase away, the game would momentarily drop to 30s...
i then proceeded to watch both mine and allied fleet fighting the group of pirates, moving through the gravity well - 2x out of 3, the game crashed as i watched the fight, zoomed around burning pirate ships. The framerates went fairly down before the crash as well - i saw it as low as 12 for moments, but it was around 20-25 - its visibly not smooth then, Third time i loaded the save, waited up this battle, as the pirate take always the same route, the game would finally not crash - eventually it would happen though, as i attacked the next pirate raid with my Titan.
So i lowered the AA to unmaskable - and so far, so good - no crashes. But safe to say, watching again my farily big fleet cca 70 ships give or take - massacring the rest of pirates as they arrived at target world, the game can become very choppy in battles even this way - for few moments it was slideshow 10 FPS.
This really bugs me, seeing that people with lesser GPUs have the game on similar settings under similar circumstances basically smooth.
EDIT: Reading post above by Nashten, as he states that now the game is smooth for him with the Radeon 7870, but was horribly laggy with Nvidia GTX470, i dare to say, this is some Nvidia-related issue (not just Visual C++ crashes, but overall choppiness). Now 7870 is for sure better and newer GPU than 470, but i checked Tech Power Up, and on average, 470 is about 80 percent of 7870´s speed. Now surely 20 percent cant make difference between smooth and horribly laggy.
