[Pred the Penguin]

Make sure you're using the builds The_E provided and that your in game options menu lighting detail is turned down to the bottom setting. If that doesn't help, I'm not sure what to do next.

Still having those framerate stutters that make the game pretty much unplayable.

[General Battuta]

Your graphics hardware is probably struggling with the deferred lighting code.

[Kolgena]

My performance tanked as well, but setting spec_point 0 seemed to help. Of course, you lose all point light sources (glowpoint lights, explosions, laser lights), but at least the game is playable.

Is there a way to cap the number of lights that the deferred renderer draws?

[MP-Ryan]

Well, since cranking the lighting in-game right down with the latest build, I can once again enable advanced effects and post processing.

[Kolgena]

The build I have for that turns off normal maps at 3 dots out of 5 or lower. Is there a newer build that doesn't do that?

[TwentyPercentCooler]

I have a slightly related question: does the deferred lighting load the CPU at all? Because I didn't notice a framerate drop between WiH1 with the old builds and WiH2 with the new ones, without changing anything anything at all about my settings, and my graphics card is only on the low end of midrange.

[The E]

The build I have for that turns off normal maps at 3 dots out of 5 or lower. Is there a newer build that doesn't do that?

Yes.

[Kolgena]

Thanks! Works better.

A certain oddity (intentional?) is that even at spec_point 0.3, warp rifts cast huge intense lights. Normally this looks alright, but when a wing of 6 fighters warps in all at once, nearby capships basically turn white from the intensity. This is at 3 dots/5, so no glow points, no laser lights.

Overall, the new rendering code seems faster than the old code that I capped to render at max 4 lights a scene. There was much enjoyment to go back and play Delenda este with smoother framerates.

Edit: Also weird: Cap ships receiving beam fire will be lit by the beam lights until they die, at which point their debris/exploding husk loses all lighting from beams. Maybe this always happened, but lights are behaving better and more reliably overall IMO, so this issue stuck out to me more.