I wouldn't mind a option where you have small clusters farther apart if it meant same amount of stars on a bigger map. I think youshould make a ticked. You have four gigs Iif memory. What is your speed of your proxessor,  what kind of processor,  what kind of graphics card do you have,  and how big is your graphixs memory,  or what kind of onboard graphics do you have.

I believe there was a post somwhere about how a 4x compared to an fps or even an rpg in system use

the short version is that many games that are high end graphics only need to use resources for things immidiately around the player

wheras a 4x game needs to track everything that is going on everywhere all the time.