AMD X4 965BE OC @ 4GHZ on water(Tried stock speed too before you ask)

8GO DDR3 1600 MHZ

RAID 0 Raptor 10000 RPM

Ati 5970

Everything is cool

I actually re-installed Windows 7 just for the release of the game.

No matter what settings used and resolution the game is getting slower and slower after about 200 turns. 

I've got an M11xR2 (Core i7 640UM @ 1.2GHz, 4GB, 335M)

It appears to run fine for me, granted my proc is a bit better.

I had to use patched drivers (257.21) so that I could program with CUDA on the system. You could try to install the most updated nvidia drivers you can find.  Not the Dell ones though, they are usually behind the times.  You'd probably have to get some patched ones too, but I'm not sure, I did it a while ago.

The R2 has optimus but you have to manually switch, I'm sure you've already make sure it was set to performance but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

That's all I can think of for you to try.  I hope you get it to a playable state.

My phenom II black edition handles it pretty well. So it's not all AMD, although i do use a tool to disable the windows tlb patch which chokes some AMD processors quite badly.

Anyway the OP's processor has a terrible FSB speed, 800Mhz is bad... very bad. That'll kill your performance more than the clock speed ever will and would explain why overclocking does absolutely nothing.

On another note supreme commander is an entirely different game, it was designed to allow you to have upto 8000 units on screen at once and survive on fairly moderate hardware. Where as this is a turn based strategy, supcom has to do alot of pathfinding but i'll bet you anything that elemental has to do alot more operations per engine cycle just to keep all the data upto date for every single object in the game.

I'm sure the e-peen of some guys around here just grew into extraordinary sizes

Ah well I'm running Elemental on my trustworthy little AMD X2 6400@3,2GHz, GeForce 250, 4 GB RAM, Win 7 32Bit, newest drivers all around, even looked up new drivers for my tiny little Creative Audigy 2 ZS...just love that soundcard.

Game hasn't run smooth up until now. I haven't noticed heavy drops in FPS when viewing towns or anything at all but it just feels slow overall. Not the usual "choppy" way of slow but the "ewww I stepped in chewing gum" slow. Since all UI elements are responding rather fast and even edge scrolling is pretty normal only the overall slowdown of animations and units seems to be the one thing that annoys me.

Looking at the GPU I can't think of it being the source of the performance issues. The CPU should be okay too and since there is no real slowdown that depends on parsing XML files, loading times or during turns, where actually anything on the CPU should happen I'd say that my CPU seems to be bored most of the time. So coming back to the GPU when looking at animations I wonder if the engine actually puts some of the animation tasks on the CPU instead of the GPU or even places a lot of useless stuff into the RAM.

...hmm....I should check some of the logs and see whats actually going on in MY Elemental.

I'm using this system:

AMD 940 Black Edition quad core 3.6ghz

8gb Corsair ram

4870x2 HD 2gb Vid Memory

Xtreme Audigy Gamer Soundcard iirc

I get atrocious performance once the second city goes up. If the cloth map weren't an option it would be borderline unplayable, even building city improvements can be a bit of a chore. My system isn't top of the line but it should definitely be enough to run elemental imo. I've yet to encounter another game that it couldn't run on high. Something is up with the optimization for elemental, love the game but it does indeed run like crap.

(this is without the patch last night and of course the 0-day patch, either of those might've helped we'll see)

Still the same problem with 1.01 patch still a memory leak issues in there...dont worry stardock will fix them! Empire total war had really bad memory leak issues in the beginning then they fix them now a great game! I got got faith in stardock to fix the game!