The intro and main menu run fine (other than the intro sound blipping off for a few seconds, but I'm not bothered about that.) but the actual game play itself is ridiculously slow. It seems to run at a few frames a second which is unplayable. I can't seem to find any graphic options or speed options in the installation folder to tweak this.
Any one got a solution?

have you tried any of the shortcuts compatibility settings? Also if that doesn't fix it could you please post your system specs and OS?

I haven't got this release yet, so I don't know if this works in the GOG version, but try adding the command -nozlock to the command line of the game's shortcut.

I found out that the seat at the front of the ship rather than the one you're put into (the seat you get your briefing from) is the culprit. For some reason, if you stay in the briefing seat and pilot the ship from there, there wont be any slow downs. Hope I make sense.

Have you tried pressing TAB to go into full screen mode?

None of these options work for me. Tried 256 colours, 640x480, win95, xp sp2, and Disable display scaling on high DPI settings.
No matter what screen I try to fly in, it lags. The briefing and other menus are fast though.
AMD 3500+ single core at 2.2GHz, 2GB Ram, GF 6800, Win 7 32 bit.

Have you turned on starfield blurring in the ingame options? If you have, turn it off, it kills framerates.

Ok, you're a genius, turning starfield blur off worked. All sweet now.

Same problem here, same solution (disabling the blur effect).
Maybe you should flag cyberneticbarry's post as the solution ?

Yep, same here - Win7-64 and disabling starfield blur fixed it.

The very very low framerate some people experience with that option only really ever happens on glide wrappers, but even on an actual 3Dfx card that option had some performance hit and I usually disabled it.
The starfield blur feature was really designed for software mode anyway, mainly to disguise the low framerates that PCs suffered from back then. You were lucky to get framerates of 20fps in software mode, on a Pentium 90 or 120. Normally it was much lower. I remember when I saw the game running on a Pentium 2 for the first time and it was running at 25fps, which I thought was amazing. The same goes for 3Dfx mode - 25fps hardware accelerated 3D at 800x600. Astonishing! :-)

Why would you want the starfield blurred anyway, just makes it harder to get points of reference. :P

Just to say that the solution was actually the starfield blur on my pc too (I probably changed the other settings at the same time). So someone should tag the cyberneticbarry's post as the solution (apparently I can't).

Had the same problem, removing starfield blur worked like a charm