I think I was right on the edge of being able to play with a solid 50fps frame rate prior to the update of shaderlib and just that little bit of extra CPU usage causes some drops down below 50fps.
I'm running @ 50fps because 60fps used to give occasional slowdowns using the old version of Shaderlib, so playing at 50 fps allowed me to reduce the workload a decent bit and maintain a smooth constant frame rate.
Playing with normal maps I get some pretty frequent drops down below 50 fps. Playing without normal maps I see fps drops on rare occasions, but, it is not frequent enough to be a concern.
Also my compy must be doing some sort of auto load balancing as Starsector uses all 4 cores while I'm playing the game. At one particular point it was using 313% out of 400% across all 4 cores. When I stop the game CPU use drops down to nothing. I'm pretty obsessive about not running any background processes or services on my computer. I am using the 64-bit version of the Java runtime with 1024/2048 memory settings.
One last thing, physical memory usage is only about 2.5GB while playing the game so that seems OK. Gfx card memory usage maxes out @ 600MB w/o Uomos Corvuz and about 800MB with.
So yeah, I think everything is fine and the new version was just enough to cause a noticeable difference. I turned on triple buffering so that should make the fps drops less noticeable.
Just in case you want to see it, here is a picture from Afterburner of my CPU cores during a SS mission. This was only about 2-3 minutes of game play and I cleared the graph right before launching the game.
So let me know if anything seems out of place and thank you for your time.