I would like to share my observations regarding the game's performance and ways to optimize it. This applies to version 1.07. My computer is a Core 2 Duo/3ghz processor (E8400), with 4 gigs of memory, and a Geforce 9600. All running on Vista 64 bit. The game now runs at a nicely 30-ish FPS for me, hitting 40 sometimes.

Biggest performance drains are:

1.) Outlines.  In my tests, having outlines enabled was a third drop in frame rate.  The same game scene was rendering at 20 FPS with outlines on, and 30 FPS with outlines off.  This is big, folks.

2.) Playing in a window.  Performance increased from 30 to 38 FPS, displaying the same scene, after going from a window to full screen. Same resolution, same detail settings, everything.

If you are not happy with how Elemental is running for you, turn off outlines and make sure you're in fullscreen.

Every other graphical setting had minimal or zero effect.

- Shadows on High versus shadows turned off: a cost of about 2 FPS.  The effect is very subtle, you may not even miss this.

- Anti-aliasing: Zero effect on performance between off and 8x.  Clearly Elemental is not being limited by the video card at all (at least not a getting-oldish 9600)

- Particles: tiny cost.

- Font smoothing: tiny cost (and perhaps for some actually easier to read)

- Mipmapping levels: I couldn't find any difference in framerate while scrolling or watching the game, however, things seemed to zoom in and out a little smoother if this is set to '1'.  Normally mipmapping is used to reduce the processing the video card needs to do by swapping in low-resolution textures at a distance. It's like level-of-detail for textures.  In Elemental's case, since it's not even remotely stressing the video card's rendering power, it seems to actually cost more to have that texture swapping going on.

- Ground cover: Like shadows, a tiny 1 or 2 FPS hit for a fairly subtle effect.

- Stylized lighting: A small hit to performance (about 4 FPS for me).  The softness level has no effect on the cost.