I'm finally wanting to take the time to play HW1 (classic) for the first time (if there's nothing unexpected :P), but am only noticing now that framerate seems... not smooth ? (but in a regular way : it's more " always low FPS"). I checked FPS : constant 60. I tried to lower resolution and disable ALL effects : nothing changes. So I'm finally wondering if this "visually not smooth" wasn't already there in the original version, and so that the classic has no issue : and it would simply the original game engine who wasn't smooth, but since I never played the game at it's release, I can't know.
I can move camera totally smoothly, but if I move a ship, the animation seems to be slow (I lock the camera with the moving ships and look at a reference point like the mothership).

So, is this normal ? If not, is there something I can do ?

Don't know if anything has changed with the release of Emergence, but Cataclysm seems to behave pretty much the same as Homeworld 1.
Cataclysm added a streaking effect on dust particles when the camera is tracking a moving ship, which can make movement seem a little bit smoother.

That is correct, Cata was basically the HW1 engine with various improvements to fit the story line and common gripes of HW1. :)

Okay :) For what I heard, Emergence is supposed to be the same than Cataclysm (only the name changed). I'm curious to see it ! But first, I'll have to play first Homeworld :D
Thanks again for your help ! Thanks for the precision :)

When I played it around 2002 it was laggy and framerate was dropping in big battles. I had Celeron 600 and TNT Riva (both very bad, despite relatively good paper specs).

Later I got Athlon 3000+ and GeForce. Some animations were a bit choppy (someone mentioned fixed tics). But the framerate was constant and effects completely smooth. I'm not sure if I played at 3Dfx or OpenGL. - It was definitely smoother then now and everything looked better. Not sure why I have FPS drops on much superior hardware in 2024. Just like other games it might need some patching. E.g. Earth 2150 has similar problems.