Hmm. I'd also want to take note that scenes with lots of particle and weapon effects will very considerably hit the framerate. This is causing the biggest drops with a multitude of fighters unloading everything on a single target so that everything happens in player's field of view.
Another thing tanking performance really much seem to be scenes with multiple suns at different angles, i.e. one certain skybox in BP:AoA that player sees during first contacts with Vishnans, just after Forced Entry.
I'm also wondering if -no_glsl flag still works or if there's something that replaces it in modern FSO. While turning off shadows and mayyybe deferred lighting will allow people to play on low-end GPUs even with more pompastic mods, that kind of a flag surely would make FSO playable with even integrated or small, energy efficient graphics chips, right?
Also, this being more of a Knossos thing, but whatever - how about there being a tab for each mod:
People played this with:
<system specifications>
<graphical settings (I'd assume everything enabled unless specified here) + resolution>
<results>
that both the mod maker and players could add entries to?