When I changed my video-settings, namely AA and AF (which required a screen-reset), Empires crashed (I had already joined the server!). It is a rather minor issue though since barely anyone would change their settings ingame, but I thought it might help to bring this up in favor of polishing. Furthermore, FPS are WAY lower when AF and AA are on while this was not the case in the previous version of Empires (based on looking at the mid on district). EDIT: Well, ingame could be quite misunderstood. To clarify: I had already joined the server so I was actively playing.
set your AF to only trilinear. that way u get a lot more FPS and textures are sharper then with AF 16x. I get min 65 and max 140 fps when looking around district middle with AA: 16x CSAA and AF: trillinear on gtx260.
well I don't see real visual difference in modern games with huge textures, except for AF raping fps in most modern games. test it yourself.
As far as I remember TEXCOORDS shader semantics imply use of perspective-correct sampling. So if we/Valve put too many texture coords in TEXCOORDS or some that don't need perspective correction it'll slow down. Source also uses a lot of different textures at once at high detail settings. OpenGL has manual, explicit keywords for perspective-correct coords/sampling.