There is some strange FPS drops here and there. Big city battles seem to clog the system a lot, while there are no issues with "medium" battles. It's probably a memory issue or something? I think they said they are upgrading the system later for more memory? (32-bit to 64-bit)

Agreed. Does slow does a little on my machine too....but not horribily so. Just enough to notice that a slow down is occuring. But usually happens when I see 20+ cities on the map and I haven't done my dillagence in clearing out the monster spawns...

I run a dual core 3gig/3gig, winXP-32bit system with 3.25gigs of active RAM and a 512meg videocard. Nothing but the best for parts. Put it together in 2008 myself and the worst that has happened to it to date? My fan blew about a month ago.

I most recently started a game on a huge map with 25 Factions (excluding me) also on the map.

After a few turns which calculated much longer than usual (obviously caused by 25 enemy calculations) the game itself became hardly scrollable and was responding slower than normal. Hitting "turn" would often result in crashes..

My PC spec can handle Skyrim fully modded. So its most likely happening on your pcs too if you would try to play on a huge map with 25 opponents.

Hmm, not quite the problems I'm having, but thanks for the replies.

The game isn't unstable- it doesn't crash, or behave in any weird way, and strictly speaking it's not un-playable. I'm just wondering why frames per second on the world map drop from 60 at the start of the game, to mid-20s by the time more than two cities and various creeps are being displayed. It's jerky as anything. I COULD just use the cloth map, but I feel I'd be missing a big part of the game. Scrolling to a less dense area of the map does, of course, make the framerate shoot back up, but it just makes the transition between areas more immersion breaking.

For the record, this is on an i5@4.3,a 560ti, and 8 gigs of RAM. I'm measuring frames per second with FRAPS. Restarting the game doesn't help, either. Nothing abnormal is running in the background. 

Cheers!

Is it possible to set up a 'low quality trees' setting that would significantly or meaningfully reduce the strain on the draw codes?

Just wanted to echo the workaround for the graphics memory usage/slowdown thing.  I've found that when the game starts lagging, a save, quit and restart fixes the problem for a bit, and performance improves quite a bit from how it was when you saved.  As I remember, a simple save then reload works too, but I've been in playtesting mode for a bit so I haven't done many late games lately, under 1.2...

To answer the question I was asked..

Yes I do have 64-bit

Another thing: Restarting every 30mins should not be the solution because once I closed the game I do not want to open it as much as before if you know what I mean.

Also Thank you Frog for answering this thread.

I made a mod that improves performance by reducing tile details.  You can get it here.  

http://fallenenchantress.nexusmods.com/mods/1866/

Unfortunately it doesn't work with existing save games since the save games seem to store the tiles in them, but it will work for new games.  This should help.