6
The first thing I did was run numbers on individual maps for a base line. Unfortunately, it appears that a couple of maps simply would not present themselves enough today, so there is a little bit of missing information (not that it is really terribly important).
One of the variables I tested for was the somewhat widespread myth that turning hardware acceleration off for flash actually helps performance a ton because of the HUD being flash-based. I normally have it off anyway, so I turned it on for a couple of rounds. Since I only have 2 results, you could easily dismiss this, but it appears that it does not have much if any impact on game performance. Or, at least it doesn't for those of us with high-end hardware.
The second variable I tested was a new suggestion that popped up regarding the windows system timer resolution. My system is defaulted at 1.0ms, so I had pretty big doubts this would do anything. The results appear to agree (again, there are only a few results, but that is how it appears).
So we can call these two busted when powerful systems are in use.
I also learned a few things, which I kind of already knew, but now have the numbers to back it up. The first is that this game needs a lot of optimization done still. The second is that the map designers clearly do not have much of an idea how their designs perform. The third is that Mining Collective is too heavily-weighted in the rotation (at least, IMO, as I played it roughly 40% of the time while testing today, over the course of about 30 matches). The fourth is that overall performance demands are so high that even with a top-notch system one cannot expect consistent performance and definitely cannot expect a minimum of 60fps without making quality sacrifices. The fifth, which was completely expected, is that dropping with a group and using teamspeak does not contribute to any noticeable slowdowns. The TS overhead is extremely minimal.
There are a couple of anomalies in my FPS that I'm sure are flukes, and I did not remove these from the results, but when I look at the minimums it's pretty clear to me that PGI has a lot of work to do. This kind of performance out of $1500-2000 worth of hardware is crap (as if I needed to beat that dead horse again). The other take away here is that every time somebody says they get a smooth 60fps with everything on the highest settings, they're either full of it or they've got $3k worth of hardware sitting in front of them and all of it is overclocked pretty heavily while being cooled with a wicked custom loop.
Other then CW dropping down to 25 fps but normally avg 35-50 before the 64 bit client, after I don't see 25 fps anymore, and avg jumped up to around 45-70 fps in CW.
