I've noticed for some time now that Spiral Knights has some problems rendering particles. They cause large amounts of lag that are rather unprecedented for such small graphical functions. For example, I experience small spikes of FPS lag every time a knight dies and drops "heat particles" around them. If two knights do this at the same time, the FPS lag becomes very, very significant, if not only for a moment.

I notice the same problem while battling Lord Vanaduke, who drops FPS to zero for about half a second whenever he drops debris from the roof... ESPECIALLY if he's on stage 3 or 5, when he can spawn lava as a result. Let it be known that, all this time, I've been playing Spiral Knights only on Low Graphics settings.

So, in general, I think it would be very beneficial to look into optimizing particle systems in Spiral Knights. My graphics and processing specs aren't fantastic, but they also aren't poor by any stretch of the imagination. I'm running a 3-year old iMac with a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4 GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon HD 2400 graphics card.

--Lyzak