Nope, zooming in only taxes the video card a bit more. The stutter is caused not by the video card, but by the CPU and the RAM's speed and volume due to the huge amount of calculations made by the AI which all happen on the map at the same time.
Zooming in or out makes no difference in that case, especially in large maps.
apieceoftofu, if it's any comfort (and I know it's not), the Entrenchment beta causes my entire PC to grind to a halt mid-game, up to a point that it becomes completely unplayable - 1 second turns to 4 seconds, so research is pointless and fleet tactics is ridiculous. All those ships, fighters and buildings all around the map and now the starbases and mines as well? Not good. My system is: 8800GTX, 2GB 800MHz RAM, Core2Duo E6600 CPU.
I can't wait for the release of Windows 7 so I could buy a new PC already 