How much better is performance likely to become?

I'm asking this because, while I enjoy the game a LOT, it would be nice if I could play it above low/medium settings! On low the game still lags a lot when certain things happen (nukes, advanced radar showing me every unit etc). My computer isn't high end but it's certainly not a bad one, on most games I can play on high/ultra. I realise that the game is in beta so is likely to improve, but will it improve enough for my to push the settings up to high/uber for this game?

My rig:
Fx6300 (6 cores) at 3.50GHz
8GB RAM
Geforce 2GB GTX660

The performance will get much much much better.

Performance optimization is one of the last things to be done in game development.

That's good to hear! Also thanks for the speedy reply

Obviously optimisation has not yet been done performence definitevely will get better ... by how much? I dont think that can be answered

This is absolute total speculation on my part (and I mean complete guesswork) but I'd say a rig like that would be able to play at least on high comfortably by release, simply because a lot of gamers care a lot about graphics quality and for PA to reach some parts of the market it will have to have to fit in with the standards set by other games (as you said, you can play most games on high/ultra) or some individuals won't buy it.

Of course maybe uber is happy to flip a middle finger at those people, which I'd also be totally happy with

Why do you smile at my demise? :O

Incidentally, I noticed there's some option for showing terrestrial units "always" or "range based".

Default is "always", which seems to including showing you units on other planets. That can't be helping. I set it to range based and it seems like everything disappears if you zoom out far enough? That should probably be default.

I always wonder what it's costing me whenever another planet moves through the background and everything on that other planet is apparently being drawn.

Dude i have a I7 2600K @ 4.5ghz and the game runs slow as **** mid to late game. The problem is not your system.
RomeII runs at well over 30fps on my system with thousands of much more highly detailed units than PA.
So the conclusion is that "this is beta" and the game will be heavily optimised in the coming months.

I run a 2600k at 4 atm and even large games are well playable.
Just out of interest, what GPU are you using?

Your CPU will have very little effect on your performance, so long as you are not running a total POS

It's all about bottlenecks, you will only run as fast as the slowest part, and right now, that is your internet connection and the game engine itself. There comes a point when the game just isn't capable of utilizing your hardware. That is why you can have a kick *** graphics card, put it to Uber settings and get 25 fps, while only using 10% of the cards power.

Performance optimization in software is as much about improving utilization as efficiency.

In most games that would be true, but large-scale RTS games have a habit of eating your CPU for breakfast. Granted, CPUs are a lot more capable now than they were when SupCom came out, where things were so bad that you couldn't even play a 2v2 without things grinding to a halt.

That said, this IS a much simpler game than SupCom and should run just fine on a mid-range computer once it's actually optimised.

Diffrence between high and uber is cosmetic. I'd say it's not worth it. I took a step down from uber to high and have significant improve in fps. From like 25fps in very bad cases up to 60 in very bad. And almost all the time fps is above 100.

I to have been disappointed with the performance of PA. The fps seams to be CPU bound with frame drops occurring when CPU usage approaches 30%. With a unlikely hog of CPU being the UI. I gain 10 fps with the UI off(ctrl + u) . Further more mousing over any structure, thus bringing up the little information box, takes me from 60 to 40 fps. Late game the lag is so bad 15-20 fps :'(

GTX 660 ti oc
i7 3820 @ 4.3 ghz
Intel SSD

I've been plagued by a faulty graphics card that needs fixing, currently I have a 70% success rate when playing games (only against Ai for now since I don't want to be rude and lag out while playing a person, and the ai is too easy ) as long as i only use planets at scale 3 or below

even then colonizing another planet is when things start to get slow

dont even get me started on when the advanced satellite comes online,

I'm personally surprised by how well PA is optimized. I can play it reasonably well on a mid-range work laptop. The only hurtle is internet speed, which hopefully will be optimized a bit, especially in lobbies.

I'm running a 7950 that is over clocked.
I found a setting in UI which is some thing along the lines of "only draw what is in range" which got it working well. I also found out a major cause of slowdown is when people start spamming hundreds of unused units from factorys. Now in team games if i see blobs of unused uneeded units i destroy them to improve perf.

Thanks for your reply.
Really interesting to see as we both have roughly the same performance in hardware (6970 for me) but I have no such problems.
I take it for granted your on latest beta drivers.

Performance is something we're always looking at. It'll improve over time, no doubt.