Sorry I have no clue since I never monitor my frame rate and to date I've only played DL so I even if I did pay attention to this I couldn't hazard a comparison to DA.

The thing is that this might be unknowable to the extent that it is probably very dependent on your specific video card.

Anyway there are a couple of people I know that do go back and forth between the two versions that might be able to hazard a guess but even then one of them currently has a relatively low end system and probably plays with most graphics features turned way down or completely off.

MottiKhan and DethAdder are the two names that first come to mind, perhaps they can be coaxed to respond here.

I'm afraid I won't be of much help here.  I have all video settings at the minimum on both games and view the game zoomed out to icon mode.  I see no difference in performance, but that means little or nothing with my setup.

The only difference I can see is that to set up DA for minimum video settings, there's a single click that takes care of most settings for me.  I have to click each one in DL.

 

I'm running an 8800 GTS 512 MB and it's barely loaded by the game at 1680x1050 resolution.  That's with all video options enabled and 4x AA.  Video performance shouldn't be a concern at all with your card.  However, the performance difference between DL and DA is going to seen in the responsiveness of the game for CPU intensive tasks.  DL does things noticably faster in that regard.  DA has a lot more features and "stuff" in the game so it's not quite as responsive.  I think GC2 is unusual in that it needs a lot of CPU power and not so much GPU power.  It even runs great on my Laptop that has an ATI X1600 GPU.  That's a middle of the line graphic processor comparable to the 8600 GT.

 

8600GS, here (512 dedicated). Many disabled could be turned back on with this specific card since the Dual_CPU system can coordinate the extra resources at a reasonably fast rate.

 

DA still runs a tiny bit faster than on the earlier PC (6200AGP) and i couldn't really detect that much of a difference for DL.

What truly gained a noticeable speed is when bigger maps are played all the way through the end; the HUGE amounts of activity makes for cpu intensive rendering which are handled quite well. GPUs will always provide support for precision and enhanced texturing, no matter how new or 'better' while the main system CPU must takes care of plenty.

TA is an entirely new experience though, and is in fact waaaaaayyyyy faster than DA -- that is, with high-end video gears or not.

 

Don't worry though, your 8800 is again a LOT more powerful than the 8600 i have.

 

AFAIC, this only add clock cycles between turns and not the 'rendering' of activities on the interface. AIs would grab up more calls & routine checks than usual and thus take longer for their decisions - which gets developped afterward by whatever happens to be ON the interface.

 

Anti-aliasing may just be *it*. I know that when this is too high, the rendering is a lot more intensive on cpu-cycles which would otherwise connect with stack ranking at a much better rate. Unstressing the global process of anything - so to speak.

i have an 8600 GTS 512MB, which is obviously different but in the same GPU family. i don't think the memory volume makes much of a difference here, and if anything your card should go faster than mine because you've got a wider memory bus and a much more robust GPU by comparison.

FYI i usually game at 1920*1200 with 4x AA while also running a second monitor off the same VGA; sometimes i even watch video on the second monitor.

no info on framerates, but GC2 typically isn't bottlenecked at the GPU. it's a much more CPU intensive game in my experience, and typically that's only between turns.

as to your original question, i would give you a "soft" answer in saying that framerates aren't much different, but the memory optimizations and changes in DA and especially TA allow for a much better looking game without much difference in VRAM/GPU footprint.

That actually might be a good idea from a performance perspective.  I've found that TA is faster in some areas than DA.  One thing to consider is that a gigantic/abundant galaxy in DA yields around 700 habitable planets.  An immense/abundant galaxy in TA yields around 500 habitable planets.  So, right there, you're going to get less of a slow down just because there's less data.  Of course, that makes TA's economy tighter.  Plus there's higher ship and building maintenance.  In TA, I've been more limited in the number of ships I can build.  That has a big impact on score, unless TA's scoring system has been adjusted, but from what I can tell, that doesn't seem to be the case.

I haven't played DL in quite a long time so I can't really compare it to TA as far as maintenance costs go.  You may be right in that maintenance costs are more similar to DL.  Planet counts definitely are.  I'd have to play a DL game to say and I don't think that will happen, I'm probably not going to play any more DA games either.

Thanks for the invite, I'll probably take you up on that if and when I start playing my "Kenny" character again.  Right now I'm playing my "blockhead" character with the Kzinti emipire, but when I finish with that one, I'll switch Kenny over to the TOE.