(Copy / Pasted from the Steam forum)

I'm not sure what's wrong with your dxdiag; I've never seen it do that before. Can I assume you have your latest drivers installed?

As far as optimizations go, one easy thing to do is defrag your drive. Some of the lag comes from simply trying to load assets off of the drive.

Another easy improvement and fairly dramatic improvement is to go into the advanced graphics settings and change to the low-detail terrain. This reduces the detail a little bit, but makes quite a difference in performance. This is literally the only way we were able to get the game to run in the memory limits of 32-bit machines, and it can still be useful on 64-bit machines, especially laptops which might have some funny shared memory configurations.

Another thing to try is turning down the vegetation detail. We saw a performance problem with the vegetation on one of our laptops.

You can also try playing with the settings file. If you're not sure where your settings file is, see here. There's also a SafeSettings.xml file in the game directory that shows some hidden settings; you'll have to copy these into your personal settings file if you want to use them.

Some of those settings are for the new multi-threaded sound engine. Most computers nowadays have a lot of cores to spare, so the sound engine doesn't tend to induce any stutter (any more), but If your computer doesn't have many cores and you have a lot of memory to spare, you can try doubling the ogg cache (which will reduce hard drive fetches) or trippling the wav cache (which will reduce ogg decompression). You can also just try turning the sound off to diagnose whether or not the sound engine is causing lag.

Ah, maybe it's not your hard drive access, then.

Usually when your mouse appears to lag, it's just because you're experiencing a low frame rate. Hegemony doesn't use any fancy hardware cursors, so when you're experiencing low frame rates, it also affects your cursor. The easiest way to measure your frame rate is to install a program that displays a frame rate counter, like Fraps.

However, sometimes lag is the result of the "flip queue" (or "pre-rendered frames", as nVidia calls it). This happens when your CPU is much faster than your GPU, and can queue up several frames, which makes it appear as though you have a high frame rate, but by the time the frames are drawn, they're old.

We fixed this for most users years ago by simply limiting the FPS to 60, but you can try lowering the FPS cap to see if that helps. We don't have a setting for this in-game, but in the SafeSettings.xml file you'll see a setting called "FpsLimit" which you can play with.

Alternatively, you can install a program called "RadeonPro", which lets you modify how big your flip queue is. Turning it down to 0 should reduce lag. NB: I've never tried this program.