Closed Uncharacteristic Lag?

Windows 7
12GB DDR3 RAM
Intel Core i7 8 CPUs
Geforce GTX 460

With these computer statistics, I shouldn't really be having lag problems, let alone in other games, such as League of Legends or Skyrim, I can play with over 100 FPS easily on maximum settings. Having a 3 monitor set-up, I've noticed the following things:

- When I play videos on my left screen (music off youtube, usually), it causes severe lag unless I switch tabs. This can be solved by playing in OpenGL mode, but that has issues of its own. As an addendum, I do this all the time on much higher-end graphical games with no issues whatsoever.

- When playing in OpenGL mode, I do not receive lag from outside sources, but I have massive lag just from the amount of objects on screen. In my farm, while it was raining, I was pulling ~8fps, but on my ship I have ~60fps. Regrettably, I don't want 8fps on my farm, particularly.

For awhile I thought OpenGL mode was my savior, but it just kept slowing down the more I played on it because I was working with an increasingly complex building on screen. At least, I believe that's what the issue was. In any case, if anyone has found a workaround or something for this, it'd be appreciated, since it's rather annoying to be forced to only make use of one monitor at a time if I have three.

As an addendum, when I stretch Starbound across my three screens, it's awesome, but also causes unplayable lag, and I feel like it should honestly perform fine under normal circumstances. About the same amount of lag I'd get from watching videos on another screen.

 

The mega-farming lag happens in DirectX or OpenGL.

I think it's from the engine treating every plant like an animated sprite, so it's like having 600npcs spawned and running around when you have a screen full of plants. Rain or mobs don't seem to add as much stress as dense planting, and even star showers don't seem to add to the issue. It's pretty reliable to cut frames in half around 250+ plants and quickly down to under 10fps when you get over 400 on the screen.

 

Ah, definitely interesting. Though, since my time of posting this, I switched back from OpenGL and the lag around my farm did stop, I'm currently running 8 rows of 100 dirt, so 800 dirt filled with any random sort of plant with no lag, but it's definitely a bother. I guess I'll just do what I can until the system can be further optimized

 

Perhaps entities aren't really optimized yet, so every single thing that's not a tile or particle would add to the lag.

I once modded a bow to shoot 100 plasma projectiles in half a circle, after 2-3 shots the game started to struggle a lot (10 fps, 5 fps), I bet when your farm reaches 100-200 crops it will start to lag slightly (reaching the 30-20 fps area).

I must say, weather (snow especially) in general causes low fps somehow, probably due to the sheer number of particles involved, but also keep in mind that some weather-types actually also produce projectiles now and then (heavy rain has waterballoon projectiles that cause the little puddles to appear).

 

I have a farm so big that it has rows where you can fit 60 single spaced vegetables (like Boltbulbs, Feathercrown, Kiwi, etc) and enough space for 60 of the triple spaced vegetables (wheat, corn, boneboo, etc.) and I have 3 rows for each vegetable and almost every type of fruit/vegetable you can grow. Before the update, the lag wasn't too bad. FPS would drop in half if I was flying around the bottom part of my farm. After the update, the lag is even worse, probably almost 2-3x as bad. An example as to how bad, a 2.97 weapon speed 1-hander swings almost 1.5-2.0 seconds each swing.

 

Yeah, I go a bit more nuts than that, with room for 625 double-wide plants on 5 levels. I've got a beefy rig, though and have never seen it drop below 9, but I can notice it start to happen any time you get much over 100 plants on the screen.