That's almost always the case since development code tends to have a lot of error reporting and debugging code that slows down program execution.  Part of the optimization process is removing the bulk of that code and then running the whole code through optimization tools that can help developers identify where the biggest slowdowns are occurring and find solutions to resolve it.

Stardock has proven themselves trustworthy, and when they say "minimum requirements" they mean that's the lowest system on which you can be guaranteed playable performance (granted with most of the settings turned down to minimum).

Here's my two cents based on my experience in beta 4

I'm running a laptop with an AMD turion ML 40, 2.2 GHZ (single core), 2GB ram and Nvidia 7900GS 512 MB, Win 7

I have the resolution set at the second to highest and have anti aliasing turned off. My machine does not like the antialiasing at all. I look at it this way, I've never been able to see the game with antialiasing turned on so I don't know what I'm missing.

It takes forever to start a new game. Initially building the world takes anywhere from 5-25 minutes, maxes out the cpu, and sometimes crashes. However once the world is built I have no problems running the game. Loading a saved games takes seconds. I've finished a game on both novice and beginner levels although the end seems kind of abrubt. In both cases I got somewhere between 600-700 turns and just suddenly got a popup that I'd won. I forget the exact wording but it seemed to me there were still other kingdoms left to conquer, spells to learn, etc. I'm writing that off to it being the beta version.

I'm by no means a hard core gamer and don't have the money to spend on a new machine right now so I'm making due with what I have. The settings I've listed above worked in beta 4 so I'm guessing they'll do for the release version.

The CPU on my machine is definitely the laggard in regards to the requirements but still seems to get the job done once the world is built. I think the rig you have should do fine. Just an aside,......my cpu is not just the laggard its really flaky,......I posted a different thread here about my issues with CPU performance. I have run the windows experience index a number of times and my cpu is consistently the lowest score on my machine coming in anywhere from 3.0 to 4.2. I tried a number of things (updating drivers, updating bios, uninstalling software, cpu-z to check clockspeed, I even cleaned out the fans and exhausts just for grins) and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the score. While I was working on the issue the index started at 3.6 dropped to 3.0 and last night was went back to 4.2 (the original score the day I bought it 3 years ago). I had made changes between the 3.6 and 3.0 scores but did nothing else between 3.0 and last night when I ran the index and got a 4.2. Something in the back of my head tells me the cpu is going to just burn out soon. Anyone know where I can find a Turion ML 40 or 44 ? Havent found anything on Amazon or Ebay (well nothing thats reasonably priced anyway)

Based on my experiences with the beta: I'll be happy if the release runs at 30fps or higher. It was terribly slow on my machine and only got slower the more I played.

Cause your comment makes you so much better and less of a troll. By the way calling a troll is a form of trolling as well fyi. ;p its a lose lose situation for ya.

 

Don't forget about the memory leak, they didnt get that fixed until the internal beta 5 I believe. So thats why it kept getting slower and slower.

 

Now to actually be on topic for once since I'm in a relatively good mood. I think there might even be a lot of performance difference between our Gold version we get a day early and the day 0 version we update to on Tuesday.  I just wonder now if the saves will be compatible. Would suck in a way to get really far in a gold game and have to start over when you update to day 0. Won't be end of the world by any means, but most games when you update the engine it invalidates the saves.

As speculative as these threads are I don't usually respond, but I actually have a desktop that's a close equivalent to your (OP's) laptop, so you may find this useful. It's an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 ghz, 2ghz RAM, ATI Radeon HD 3850 (512 memory), Windows XP. This machine can run Beta 4 smoothly in 1280x1024 with high settings (no AA), can't tell you a framerate offhand but no noticeable lag. Of course I get out of memory errors and other random crashes as many do, but we've been told those will be fixed by release, and the game does look beautiful and run well until the inevitable crash.

I did a little research and, assuming your mobility 4650 is similar to the desktop equivalent (honestly don't know much about laptop gpus), your pc should be close to mine in performance, possibly weaker when it comes to high resolutions. This comes of course with the disclaimer that laptops aren't desktops, you may have overheating issues I don't, and your 4650 may not be quite the same as the desktop version, and of course you may have to turn the settings down if you plan on a higher resolution than 1280x1024.

Er, I also should warn you that I keep that pc very clean, formatting the HD+reinstalling the OS periodically, avoiding background programs, so your mileage (performance) may vary. Your pc should run the game nearly as well as mine does, but I've seen people with so much crap running in the background that the pc performs as if it had half the specs - so I won't make any promises Not saying you don't know how to take care of your pc, it might not even be your fault - for example some universities require you to run their rather resource-hungry antivirus if you want internet access on campus, and that's a performance hit you can't do much about.

Thanks again, everybody. Your replies have been extremely helpful and thorough and I can't wait to get the game myself. It seems that, at most, I may have some overheating issues. That said, I've never had that to a great extent in turn based games and Elemental seems more CPU hungry than GFX hungry, the latter being more responsible for FPS drops due to overheating.

whatever happened with the 64 bit version?  is it still going to be implemented?

Not at release. It will come later.

I've been testing on a non gaming system i5 660(on die graphics) and 4GB RAM, no dedicated card without two many issues, yeah it looks ugly on that but performance isn't too bad.

Remember performance WILL be greatly different from Beta 4 - beta 4 is almost a month old and has none of the optimizations the internal beta 5 build has. The final Version will also have the debugger disabled (I'm assuming here, but my experiance in betas tells me that the software has extra code running to make bug reporting much more usefull). Debugging code has no real purpose outside of testing and can impact performance greatly.

pretty sure i read somewhere that the devs wanted the art style so it looked good, it stood out (2 checks so far) and it was playable on a "crappy netbook"

 

 

sounds good-thanks for the reply.

I was wondering, how flexible is the CPU requirement for Elemental? Mine is a bit old, 1.8 Ghz Athlon64 3000+.

The rest of the PC meets the requirements, 1GB of RAM and an X1950 Pro video card which is actually very powerful for an AGP card.

You will probably be playing on the cloth map, or with most the eye candy turned off sorry to say.

As long as it can run I'm fine with it.

They're trying to make it run on a Notebook so you shouldn't have any problems running it witht the specs you mentioned.

Brad said this in a recent interview:

"[T]his game actually has the same hardware requirements as GalCiv II because we avoided doing any bump-mapping. All games have bump-mapping these days but it’s really expensive from a hardware, CPU, and video card standpoint. But because of the game's art style we didn't have to do bump mapping so our game will actually run on a netbook. . . I actually bought a three year old Thinkpad as my demo machine to drive home the point about the game's hardware requirements. It's getting 40 - 50 frames a second."

Most working Betas also have more Debugging running in them, this normally gets turned off in release, so I would expect some improvement.

 

Perhaps not HUGE but some.

 

But wait for a demo to be sure.

 

But the game seems to require less of a system than many released these days.

 

One reason I dislike Netbooks is they look like a small laptop, but really are much less. I think they were a bad thing for the public.

 

They are great for light work and writing papers, email and the such, but much else they show the issues.

 

Good Luck

Lee

 

No kidding.  Check out Civ 5's requirements.  They're insane for a turn-based game.

But that's precisely the kind of thing netbooks are intended for making your criticism perplexing.  It's a bit like criticizing a minivan because it doesn't run like a high-performance sports car.