I'm running an Athlon 64 X2, 2gb of ram, and an Nvidia 8500GT.

In beta, I'm playing at 1280x1024 with the highest resolution textures and all the effects turned on. I don't think I've ever dropped below 25 fps.

Sins is ridiculously resource-efficient for how good it looks.

Optimal...I guess I'll give my home PC as an example. I play at 1920x1200 with all settings maxed.

• Intel Core 2 Duo @ 3GHz
• 4GB System RAM
• GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB PCI-E Video Card
• SoundBlaster X-Fi Fata1ity

I run it on Vista 64-bit, but if you have anything even remotely close to the above system on XP, it should be more than enough.

it's the only way to play games

so true......

After my computer's disheartening performance on SupCom (fine on small maps, ugh...on larger ones), all the talk of "dual core" this and that support for this game had me nervous. Was one of the reasons I held off from buying into the beta. Having taken the plunge anyway, I was relieved.

I'm running beta4 on a 2ghz p4 with 1gb ram and a 9800pro. All graphic options checked, high texture settings, at 1280x10XXwhatever. Game runs a helluva lot smoother than SupCom, even late-game with hundreds of ships cruising around. Only stutters I ever get are (literally) one to two second hiccups after loading saved games, nothing else from first colony to last orbital bombardment.

nice...   and when I can make a 6 digit annual salary playing computer games I'll have a system like that..  ,

until then my real career (which does make me 6 digits   ) demands I travel frequently and therefore a desktop or even one of those silly gaming desktop replacements pretending to be a laptop arn't very useful

what I got comming sounds like it should be just fine or at least pretty close to it, especially since I'll be playing on a much smaller screen. (1680x1050)

Athalon 64-T66 - 2.3 Gz,
4 Gig Ram, with the
512Mb Raedon HD2600 (yea I'm well aware it's really 256 mb)
64bit Vista...

a 8800GTX video card would have been nice but when your running laptops heat and battery power are a small consideration... , any bigger than a HD 2600 or 8600GT your cooling requirements are just too combersome. The 8600GT was what I wanted but it pushed the price above my budget ceiling, (amazing how quickly 3 kids will eat up an afore mentioned 6 digit salary  ) the chipsets aren't quite as adaptable as in a desktop so I was stuck with the AMD chipset... (I did find a Core Duo with the right chipset at the right price but not until last night after my AMD based machine had been shipped   but I couldnt get it with 4 GB Ram or 64bit Vista, so I'll stick with what I got )

I did look at a Gateway midrange laptop with the 8800GTX card for like $1350 but some accountant calling himself a computer designer paired it with a core-duo 1.6 Gz chipset.... have to say it's the first time I've seen a configuration where the processor is the bottleneck...    - only reason I can think is they wanted to keep some semplence of battery life and so scaled back the processor.