I do not get the extreme choppiness some of you explain. Naturally, I want to assume your graphics cards because I have an AMD HD 7870. Yet again, I turned anti-aliasing to its minimum level (not off) turned bloom off and reduced exhaust trails to nothing and ship bump to medium. ODDLY ENOUGH AS WELL! My previous video card, a GeForce GTX 470, caused my game to lagg horribly too. 

The AI and I duked it out with over 150 ships. I myself had 150-some odd fighter/bomber squads. Plus an Orkulus starbase which I phased in. (Vasari rebels are dirty!) Battle included Titans. 

I also run my own music in the background. (Current song obsessions) and I have microsoft office going on my second monitor. I read and write passively when I wait for periods of time in the game. 

As others said, it could be a limitation of the games engine itself. I am not trying to start a war of GPU's here. But it could also be Nvidia's drivers having a lack of performance tuning for the game?

My computer specs: 

Core 2 Quad Q9650 @ 4.2GHz 
6GB DDR2 1066MHz 
AMD HD 7870
Game installed on a WD Cav-Black 1TB 

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. 

If you really have a 4GHz CPU, that's the secret to your not lagging. This is a single threaded game, raw speed on one core trumps all as the amount of stuff goes up. Stuff like runningoffice on another monitor isn't relevant, it can use the cores Sins can't.

No, its not. I have mine on 3,8 GHz - granted its not 4,2 - but its westmere i7, not core2 architecture... and as described above, it can be very choppy.

Brand new game - $39 ($69 approx if you bought Trinity as well as it was released)

Top of the line computer $1500-2000 give or take

The joy of realizing that your brand new game made in 2011-2012 can only use 1/4th if not less of your computers capabilities -

hihi ..lifes a bitch.. 

Better switch to Diablo 3 and Starcraft like everyone else here whose too ashamed to reveal the best part about sins is the forum-not the performance of the game.

As if the SC2 or Diablo were some pinnacle of gaming graphics and technology.

I suspect that once SD irons out the Nvidia issue we will have a very different feeling game.

why don't you all get over it , sins engine is old as hell 

Something isunhappy with your setup then, because I'm running at 2.8 i7 and I don't laguntil things get really busy. Ati video here.

BTW guys I don't remember who mentioned it but unpining the Empire Tree made a HUGE as in night and day performance difference for me.