There seems to be a long time misconception on why the performance in the game is poor and wildly uneven. Let us first get the wrong idea out of the way, it is not due to networking. According Clive Johnson of CIG, networking never had any affect on the performance of the game, which is independent from the network. The poor performance is simply the game processing so many players and ships at the same time. There is thought process that says it is due to the server degradation, which is not again true; the reason you will get better performance on a newer server over an older one is because the new server will likely have very few players present and your system is not having as hard time as the older one which might already amassed a lot of players already. The performance is entirely client depended, has nothing to do with servers. From my own testing I notice that the game hardly uses GPU at all and pushes the CPU to the max. What happens is the CPU is working very hard on game logic, physics, entities, etc while the GPU is not doing much work at all. This is partly due the CPU having not enough resources to send render instructions to the GPU and hence the GPU is not having much work to do (by work I mean push better frames). I have a older core i5 4570, 16GB RAM and GTX 970. You would expect my older GPU will be put to the max at very high settings for such a high fidelity game like this, however, my GPU is only 35% used on average while my CPU is almost always hugging 100%. When it reaches 100%, the computer locks up briefly. So what does it mean for the future? The good news is we have plenty of GPU power untapped. Once the game becomes more GPU dependent than CPU, we should get much better performance. With Star Citizen expected to get even bigger, it is actually great news that we have more horse power reserved to handle all of that when the time comes. The bad news is for that to happen, we have to wait until the object container system comes online in 3.1. It is sorta implemented in 3.0, however it is not really activated. When object container system comes online in 3.1, our systems will only handle objects and entities in our viewpoint. So if you are in Yela, your system would not bother handling data from olisar. If a ship you see is right in the horizon which you can barely see, only then the CPU will kick in and handle all the entities attached to that ship. The game will dramatically drop in CPU usage when that happens and with further optimization to GPU usage and the game systems in general, we should see dramatic and more consistent uplift in performance. Hope it clears some of the misconceptions a lot of you might have. I know until a few days ago I also believed the poor performance is due to networking performance. Source: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/50259/thread/why-is-the-graphics-pipeline-waiting-for-server-up/773513(edited)