After I've been playing the game for about 15-20 minutes (everything, absolultely everything works perfectly previously to this point) I start noticing a graphics error with my fleets. I can hear the weapons being fired in combat, and the enemy hit points decrease, but I don't actually see the firing animations, nor do the enemy ship explosion animations occur. The ship simply disappears from the screen with a thunderous noise, but not visible explosion.

Combat animations seem to run perfectly fine for me early in a game. But, like I said, after about 20 minutes. They cease to exist on anything except for capital ships (which still, oddly, show their firing animations, but not explosion ones).

I doubt this is a problem with hardware on my machine (if someone knows otherwise though, please tell me), but want to know if anyone else was noticing this issue.

My machine is -

Intel Core2 6600 2.4 gig dual core processor

4 gigs of ram (technically 3.07 because windows is like that, but there are 4 full sticks in there)

GeForce 8800 GTS

As you can see, my machine is a freaking beast. Hence why this animation issue is so frustrating to me.