Tips for good FPS in Eve:
To tjeck at what FPS your Eve is running press "CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-M" - This will pop up a small windows showing FPS, it can also show other usefull stuff.
Turn of "Sun is occluded by ships" in the ESC menu under generic - This should boost your FPS a little while in-space[Newly added since i forgot to add this the first time]
Turn off sound card or just do a CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-F12 in-game (EVERYTIME you start Eve!) - Eve seems to have problems with most sound cards so changing this should free some resources. Remember to tjeck the FPS counter with this option though, you might just be one of the lucky with a sound card that Eve works with.
Put in advancedDevice=1 (notice the lowercase a and upper case D) in your prefs.ini now some new settings have appeared in the graphics options in the ESC menu, change the "present interval" to intervel immediate - This one boosted my FPS alot! "Interval immediate" means "no vsync". "Interval one" means wait for vsync. "Interval default" is probably vsync on, depending on your display setup. For the full explanation see D3DPRESENT_PARAMETERS in the DXSDK. <-- Thank you to Mark A for the info about what it does.
Change desktopHeight and desktopWidth to match thoes of your desktop in the prefs.ini - If your running your windows in 1600 x 1200 then change the settings to match those.
Change buffersize to half of what RAM you may have in the prefs.ini - So if you have 512MB RAM then you change it to 256MB
Disable any secondary display - This will give your GFX card less work to do but unless CPU is not your bottleneck this should not help much.
If posible upgrade your machine to 1024MB RAM or more - Eve uses alot of memory so upgrading to 1024MB or more should help quite a bit.
If sound card enabled try and turn off any hardware acc on it in "dxdiag" - Look at the other bit where i explained sound cards.
When in-game press CTRL-Tab to get rid of the UI (only if you can live without the scanner) - Eve seems to have some issues with the transparentcy in the UI, using this removes most of the UI and frees a lot of resources.
Close every program posible in Windows since Eve is VERY CPU demanding - Even stopping stuff like Winamp and mIRC will help, so close everything you don't need!
Run the game in full screen - This seems to boost the FPS for some reason but probely just Windows alocating more resources to Eve.
Change the eve.exe process priority in WinXP and Win2k by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del, finding eve.exe in the Processes list, right clicking on it, and setting it to High - Thanks to Drakworlf for this one, note that this setting will make Windows give Eve most if not all resources, so don't do this if you have something important running in the background.
If running Eve on a laptop with a ATI card in it then this link might help also
http://www.driverheaven.net/patje/, in there you can find a program to modify the normal cat drivers to work on mobility cards - USE AT YOUR OWN RISK! The Cat are not made to run on mobility chips so using this might cause harm to your system, im using this my self on my laptop without any problem but it does not mean that you wont have problems!