Basically, everything runs smoothly except for the character selection screen ships, tweak icons, particle effects, which look like they're being drawn at 5FPS.

I'm thinking this might be related to the change to the squad icons not being drawn as often, but yeah, it's only started recently, I haven't been on enough recently to pinpoint exactly when it started.

No settings changed, and I haven't tried reinstalling the client yet in case it wasn't just me having this issue.

I'm going on a whim here, but my brother plays on my school laptop while I play on a gaming desktop I built myself He gets all the lag you're describing while my game plays just fine.

Yeah, this is the strange thing because my computer isn't underpowered by any means, having also built my desktop myself. The game itself runs fine with it running capped at a solid 60 FPS.

Here are my specs for Jey, or whoever it may help (also to assure you that I'm not running this on some slow old machine XD):

Intel i7 3770k @ 4.5GHz, cooled by a Noctua NH-D14 (temps are fine)
Corsair Vengeance 16GB 1600MHz RAM
Samsung 256GB SSD
AMD 6950 2GB (powering 3 1080p monitors)
Windows 8 Pro

No problems in any other games, and as I said in the first post, the game runs smoothly, its just the draw rate of the particles, ships in the character selection and the little tweak icons.

SS uses the integrated (intel HD) graphics in windowed mode.

Edit: oops posted from my brother's old acc.

Hmm, interesting. I switched to full screen mode to test out if what you were saying was true, and while it didn't fix it immediately, if I tabbed to another application (thereby minimizing SS) and then back to SS again, the tweak icons run smoothly again.

I find it hard to believe that SS only uses the intel integrated graphics to run in windowed mode, since I run the game on very high, and as I say, the rest of the game is pretty smooth at around 100FPS+ when I don't have it capped. It would make more sense if in fact the game used the integrated graphics to draw the tweak icons and the other stuff which I'm having a problem with...maybe Jey could give us an idea.

Nice one finding out a fix (of sorts) though, thanks.

Intel HD 4000 can run SS on max settings just fine.. just not the particles. SS processes the particles and overlays separately from ship movement and weapon fire, it seems. That's why ship movement looked smooth while the particles and overlays looked laggy.

I've only been experiencing this on my laptop since the patch. I've always ran it windowed and with maxed out settings (aside from HDR and SSAO, because even on my desktop these two cause a significant FPS hit), and prior to this patch there were no problems of any kind.

The issue seems to affect almost anything ingame that has model animations. Particles, rotating planets and stars, all particles (weapon and ship trails, laser beams - especially noticable on transference weapons, explosions, etc), tweak effects, engine effects, warp effects and, oddly, camera panning/zooming. None of these issues were present before the patch the other day.

Edit: As Grunt said, fullscreen mode after tabbing out and back in does fix the issue, but that isn't really a solution for me, because I don't want to play in fullscreen.

Any chance of some input on this issue?

I don't know enough about SS to help you, unfortunately. You'd have to let an admin like Jey reply here. Your best guess is to create a 3D application profile for SS . I've never personally had to do that, so Google is your friend there.