
Originally posted by
Jim Sachs:
...They run the current Alpha version of MA3 at about 40 FPS, using about 25% of the CPU time. Pixel shaders should not be necessary, though I will probably be adding effects for those who have them.

So the performance bottleneck in your case is not the CPU but somewhere in the I/O bandwidth, RAM, and video card areas. Or possibly wait states?
Is MA3 multi-threaded to take advantage of modern CPU architectures?