I was in the beta and have the retail of the game, so I've been tracking the performance progress over time (didn't get to play in the Alpha...my connections with people weren't good enough). I have to say, this game is a total CPU hog. People may want to claim ping, bandwidth, GPU, or what not, but the fact is, the CPU is the bottleneck.
To put it simply, the entire synchronization issue has been solved a long time ago (look back to Starcraft and maybe even before) -- don't send the state of the game, just send the actions of the players, which results in much less information being sent over the network (both ping and bandwidth matters, in this case). This issue was the problem that plagued the original TA.
Some people may also want to claim GPU, but the simple fact is this: I have an Athlon 2500+. Yes, it's very, very old (relatively speaking), but I don't make others on the net suffer with my CPU (i.e. I won't play online unless I use a better computer or get a better one). However, we all know units and explosions are still rendered when we PAUSE the game. So what I did as a test was build about 500 units (and boy did it take me a long time), have them shoot at the enemy, but pause just before I actually kill the enemy to get the maximum number of "things" rendered on screen. And guess what? I can scroll around perfectly smooth, both zoomed in and out. Guess what else? I have a 6600GT on AGP. I suppose we can rule out the GPU here too.
I also have about a gig of RAM, so that rules out disk swapping.
What're we left with? Yes, my Athlon 2500+. So let's just end the discussion here. If you have single core, don't expect to play with 2000 units in game with silky smooth fps. Get a dual core if you don't want to make other people online suffer from your computer.
Cheers.
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