If I try to increase game speed while any ships are firing, it immediately starts freezing every few frames. The effect is the same at 1.2x, 4.0x and everything in between. However, if no ships are firing, all is fine up to and including 4.0x.
Yesterday, though, for some reason the slow-down didn’t happen. Over a two hour playing session, in large battles, I was on 4.0x the whole time and it was perfectly smooth. I suspect it may have something to do with my PC in particular, or some other application I’m running in the background, which I’d turned off yesterday.
I’m running a Q6600 quad-core, 3GB RAM and 9800GTX.
The most common speed issues people report are related to the sound code. Try fiddling with the “Pitch Shift Sounds” and/or “Hardware Sound” options and see if either one helps.
Awesome! That just fixed it! 