No 8GB is enough, I play with 4 in fact (I have trouble loading planets originally, after planet generation- but 50 - 60fps normally), what systems do you have exactly? If you have multiple size 1000s than that's your problem... You should probably work up systems with a size 800 - 1000 host planet, then smaller size 200 - 400s dotted around. Remember that size 1000 is not double the size of a size 500, it's area is actually four times as much and so uses four times the work from your computer
I installed PA on my brother's computer (which is my former one), and it was running 14.4 I was astonished to see 10-15 fps at start, remembering it didn't used to lag like that at all (at least at the game beginning with no units) Told him we'll try with 14.7 RC, he jabbered something like "It's the latest stable ones. They are not outdated yet !", but we did, and then he had a solid 60 fps at start
wow! really?! ok Im gonna try it... but then isnt there a risk that the beta driver ruins my other games?
Can't really tell, but it's always worth trying. They call them "RC", aka Release Candidate, for what it's worth To be fair, my test was on a single planet, yet the difference was noticeable (GPU being a HD5850, so one generation before yours, and with 4Gb RAM) FPS wise, you may want to avoid earth biomes with big forests, since trees seems to have quite an impact on the framerate.
Btw, as you only have 1gb video ram, your best to set the 'virtual texture' setting to minimum as it will massively boost performance on a 1gb card. Other settings like hdr and such use the graphics core but not much memory so can be left on.
