I just had my first substantial boarding event and it was unbearably laggy. I know this is an old game but I thought the 64bit engine would help in this regard. I had absolutely no lag playing GOF 1.0 so I'm a bit confused by this. 

I haven't touched any graphical settings beyond setting resolution. I don't get how these ultra-low poly characters and ship models do so much damage to GPU/CPU cycles.

Any tips or tricks to increase performance? 

System for reference:

3600x

2070 - super

16gb ram

SSD  Installation

Can't say...where's the bottleneck, CPU or GPU?  Also, in order to check the exact circumstance, it would be more helpful if you sent a boarding save for the exact encounter that I could try.

The problem strangely enough is the character models.. I loaded that same boarding event and switched on RT OSD. GPU never exceeded 10% CPU utilization is always high regardless of what the scene is, curiously it never actually maxed out. I then increased timescale and waited for corpses to despawn and gained a lot of frames. In fact, just looking at my fighters alone tanks the FPS from 120 to 55. Not normally a problem in other scenes. My guess is there is something in the deck scene that compounds what is already a very macabre issue. 

What the hell is going on inside these character models? I can safely say its not a graphical constraint. Likely unnecessary but if you still need the save let me know how I can PM you the link. Couldn't see any option to PM on this site. Just don't have confidence that Google fully patched the privacy exploits in Googledrive links.