Interval one is a limiter on the number of FPS that a GPU will render. Example, a lite graphical environment your GPU could render 200fps causing GPU utilization to hit 100% for no good reason. Where in a heavily populated graphical environment that same GPU will only render 25FPS. Setting Interval one keeps the GPU from rendering 200FPS in the lite graphical environment lowering overall GPU utilization.

The issue with gas clouds has nothing to do with the interval. The particle count in them is so high as to cause GPU utilization to shoot through the roof while FPS crashes. The GPU is being overtaxed for no good reason.

Well I'm actually having the opposite problem and seems I'm not alone.

I change some of my hardware parts almost every 2 years so the rig keeps good performances and it's cheaper than buy everything at one time.
Last change was about OS, Vista wasn't good enough for me so I jumped in to a full W8-64 Pro version for less than $100.
Now because this game caters more to 90's xp users I can't play it properly now for several months, can't join fleets or gangs because at any moment client freeze and ends with a stupid loss, even a stupid high sec site with frig rats can finish with a BC loss...

I can play other stupid games like BlacklightRet requiring a lot more of hardware than Eve without lag or freeze, graphics on top, sound, Directx11, tessellation etc on top, but I can't play Eve with minimum graphic settings (GTX460-2GDDR5) without gaming issues and this really really sucks ass.

3months now this is not fix, this will not end well.

Just so you know, I play on a Win8 64-bit box and it benchmarks better than Win7....probably a hardware thing.
And yes, the clouds, particulary with bright lights, drops my rate in half.

Guys try turning off VSYNC...

I'm not running the most super insane computer possible in the world and I've still got 300+fps in all situations AT ALL TIMES.


theres nothing wrong with the gasclouds, its the vysnc thats messed up.

I think YOU should "**** OFF". You do realize this game came out ~2003?
Some people started playing this game a long time ago and invested money and time in this game.
It is possible not to have enough to buy a 1000$+ computer and there should be an option to play without those fancy graphics.

About the clouds - yeah zooming out helps and i think I read similar things to previous poster, about this issue being looked at...

Yup same here. And my "TI calculator" is in fact a water cooled quad core 4+GHz beast with TWO screaming 500 series nvidia cards and multiple gigabytes of video RAM. While my system doesn't come anywhere near melting or dropping frames, it does kick the fans up into high gear in those clouds and of course, Captain's quarters! Because displaying a couch and some screens uses up far more resources than say, Battlefield 3.

Afaik the EVE client is still a 32bit application, so as long as that doesn't change, even 200Gigabyte of RAM won't change anything as one client can only use as much as 2.4GB of that stuff. Sad but true. Unless ofc You want to run 150 Clients at once.

One off topic question:

for the last decade or so nearly all games have been multiplattform games, so they run on a PC, an XBOX 360 a PS3. So for the last 5 years or so the recommended hardware requiremens of those games were... sub standard.

Is there any game out there except ArmA II (ArmA III is still in Alpha) that actually requires one of the monsters You described above?

I really like to know, because honestly, upgrading the PC is neary as much fun as using it afterwards... :/

I find that incredibly amusing; both the post and response here.. *sigh* It's not 2003 anymore. You can't expect a game to stagnate in quality while the world moves on without it.

My PC is perfectly capable of handling EVE, and if I were to build an equivalent with newer technology it would actually cost me less than this one did. I'd just rough estimate about $800 USD to build a PC more than capable of handling EVE and many other games.

Given it costs about $5 for a loaf of bread these days, I think that isn't really that much money. Maybe not easily spent, but I'm sure you can manage it over ~10 years.