It certainly is nothing to do with newer video cards, have an nvidia 580 with latest drivers and have no issue running the game. I have an i7 920 cpu with 10GB of ram and have only had maybe 1 crash since I started playing.

We are taking great care in terms of performance and memory.

One thing that pains me is when people talk about BF3 as if Elemental is somehow dealing with something easier.  BF3 maxes out at 64 units in a game world that has a handful of buildings (I love BF3 mind you, I'm just saying that it's not pushing your hardware as much as you may think in the ways you're thinking).  Elemental is dealing with hundreds, often thousands of units where each one is different (i.e different boots, helmets, gloves, etc.) along with many different buildings.  

The art style is designed to limit the impact of that (i.e. our units and buildings are a lot less detailed) but it's still nothing to shrug off.

The challenge is always one of finding that sweet spot in terms of performance vs. graphics vs. interactivity.  

With WOM, our hands were very tied on what we could do because every solution always involved using more memory which we were in short supply. Pixel Shader 3 lets us do things more easily.  

Right now, for instance, we don't even have a graphics quality setting.  The goal with the beta (beta 1 series anyway) is to optimize performance as much as we can with the graphics maxed and then introduce other options to lower the graphics settings.

Right now, if the game is running well for you that's outstanding. But if it's running slowly, it's not surprising and nothing to sweat because it shouldn't be running that fast for most people. It should, ideally, be running too slow for approximately 50% of the user base.

It's a LOT easier to trim back on the polygons and texture sizes than it is to try to increase them later.

FE and WOM are two very different beasts. I don't mean from a "quality" argument either, I mean architecturally, they don't share similar issues. They have their own unique ones.

So, does it make sense that people with higher-end cards would be having more pain than those with older ones? Is this a driver problem with the new cards not supporting DX 9? Or something else?

I've been toying around with getting a newer card than my nVidia 9600 GT, but given FE works great already and hearing about the problems with newer cards, I'm hesitant to do so.

I know I probably stand alone in this, but I buy only hardware that is already purchased my the largest number of customers on several websites. The result is a medium rang rig with outstanding performance in every game I play. With FE, I am getting the feeling that I will be able to run immense level maps like I did in GalCiv2 and WoM. Common use is a stat for computer hardware that is totally overlooked by even the most hardcore gamers. I find it to be the most important stat when upgrading a PC. 

Hopefully I will be in the second wave of beta invites that get sent out. I purchased my copy around the middle of 2010.

Anyways I have a fairly high end system i7 2600k with 16gb of ram and a GTX 580 video card that has 3GB of video memory.

So once my turn comes up I will let ya know if I experience any problems playing the game. 

Also for those of you that have high end systems who are experiencing a problem it might be a good idea to mention if you are using an ATI or Nvidia video card. I notice a lot in other games that some times those that are experiencing the same problems are all using either ATI or Nvidia so that may be a common factor.

Well, I think a lot of people think their cards are better than they think they are. 

I look at the debug.err and I see people who think their 3 year old nVidia/ATI card is a monster. It's not. 

That's a high end system.  That's better than what I've got and I get 60fps (according to fraps) running at 2560x1440.  Late game, the performance gets a lot worse (like 20fps) because we haven't yet added in options for simplifying unit drawing which matters when you might have hundreds on screen at once.

Heck, we don't even have an option in yet to disable animation. I have noticed a tendency in game developers to be afraid of letting people decrease the graphics fidelity. But I'd rather have my big armies with less detail than have to use cloth map.

My main point is people trying to compare WOM and FE in terms of performance and such are going down the wrong path. When we moved to Pixel Shader 3, we pretty much had to jettison the whole graphics system of WOM.  There's shared graphical assets and music but not a lot else. And believe me, I wish that wasn't the case, it would have been less expensive.

Oh snap!

I don't know if those with slow downs and crashes experience them at the beginning of a new game but for me, it has happened after playing several turns into the game. I've noticed what seems to cause it (in my case anyway) is moving through turns very quickly. Even though there is sometimes a lot to do within a turn, I tend to do what I need to in a very short time span.  Since increasing the time between end turn clicks, the game has run a lot smoother and I haven't crashed since.

LoL

Alright, you're having crashes and problems which are repeatable? That's a good thing! It means that you can contribute to making the game run better for everyone. The joy of being a beta tester means tracking down these annoying problems when they happen. It also means that when you do, and the developers get the fix the problems should be gone for good.

This shouldn't be unexpected. The core engine is still more or less the same, and we know it doesn't handle every hardware setup. So now you get to help figure out what's causing the problem. Certain mother board? Video card? Drivers? The list goes on, and every single piece of information can help.

I know it's a big pain in the ass because you want to play, but I see this and I got YAY! Because now is the time to find the problems. So have fun and I hope you don't get too frustrated tracking things down. Seriously, I'm pretty optimistic about this. It'll take time, but with help from the beta testers the crashes can finally Go Away!

Playing on the cloth map sucks. I had to do it for most of Elemental, and now I have to do it in mid/late game FE due to fps problems and poor ui responsiveness in the 3d view.

I love the cloth map in concept, as a tool for getting a quick strategic view of everything, but even in that respect I don't think it does its job well - borders are too hard to see, roads are too hard to see, city names are too hard to see, and without the small info-icons they added, I wouldn't be able to recognize many resources/enemies/etc at a glance.

Not unfixable, but definitely not a perfect tool for playing right now.

stuttering woth sound cutting out - are you sure its not a sound card issue.  I had the same issue with all of the above and I forgot to turn off my inbuilt sound card from bios and just have dedicated sound card working. I had recently upgraded the bios and ot must have turned itself back on.

I agree with the OP. Though I'm enjoying the mechanics very much, similar to WoM, once I start to explore beyond my initial settlement the game's performance plummets. Thanks Stardock crew for the acknowledgment of the issue and work to fix it!!

Pretty sure it's not...this is the only game I have these kind of problems with.