There appears to be some tentative news on the Nvidia front. The claim is you can increase your frame rate by tweaking a few Nvida settings. Using the NVIDIA Control Panel, modify the following three 3D settings:
Shader Cache Size – 10Gb
Triple Buffering – On
Vertical sync – Fast
You may need to experiment a bit with the Cache Size.
I suspect with a high end GPU, this might not be noticeable, and indeed, I didn’t see a difference. If you are stuck at 30fps in SC you might give this a try.
Patch Alpha 3.18 Update
While no direct optimization has yet been attempted by CIG, the recent code refactor to the new ‘Gen12’ code base for SC’s graphics rendering seems to have observable improvements for my higher end GPU. My frames increased from approx 60-75fps to 80-110fps on 5-30fps servers.
Of course, there are still areas with chronic fps performance like the tram at Area 18.
Face it, older cpu/gpu will never run SC smoothly.