So, I posted this first in another thread but it's since locked.  I have an older machine that I'm keeping running pretty effectively.  Before the modifications below, the game would become unplayably slow within thirty minutes, but the patches and the process below have fixed those problems for me.

 If you're having performance issues and an Nvidia card, here's what I did:

1. Within the Elemental game, go to your settings and move everything video related to their lowest settings.
   This means:
    - lowest resolution
    - lowest textures
    - no fancy things that make the game look good
2. THEN, if it's still a problem:

• Right click the Nvidia icon in your systems tray and open the "Nvidia Control Panel"
   - if it isn't in your system tray, go to your control panel and see if you have a link there.  If you don't, then our systems don't match and you can't glean from me. I'm sure you'll figure something out.
• Click on "Manage 3D Settings" under the "3D Settings" branch.
• Move to the "Program Settings" tab in the right-hand side of the screen
• Click "Add" and find your Elemental executable (right click any link to Elemental link and go to properties then Find Target, then follow the path to that file), "Elemental.exe." If you want to be thorough, do this same process for the launcher.  I'm not going to check which did it for me.
• There's many things to change here.  I've not touched everything that the documentation at the bottom says is good for performance (which you should feel free to mess with!) and it's good enough for me:

It's a sad thing to do to a game so pretty, but ... i like strategy games so that I can, among other reasons, keep my computer cheap.  Action games are the ones that should demand big money in hardware.

So. That's what you do to make it run on a minimal system.

 Pull up your Nvidia Control Panel, point it to the right program, and start forcing it to use faster, less pretty methods. 

As patches come out, be sure to revert your changes, marvel at how fast it's going, appreciate how much effort the Stardock Devs are putting into optimizations, and take the time to reconsider if you still need these ugly hacks.