Hello. First let me say I'm beyond excited for this game and to be in the Beta. I've only been in one other Beta in my gaming "career" and love it and will likely love it twice as much since I love TBS games and haven't played a good one in a LONG time.

Anyway, I just wanted to report on the performance. First, my system:

CPU: Athlon 3800+

RAM: 2 GB

OS: Win XP Service Pack 2

GFX: BFG GeForce GTS 250 OC (factory overclock)

GFX Slot: PCI-E

Driver: Nvidia v257.21

Max Res (on monitor): 1280x1024

Game Resolution: 1024x768

Broadband Internet connection

SB Live External using basic MS drivers.

Performance Notes:

1. Game takes a VERY long time to load on start. There's a lot of initial disk activity where it looks like it's going to load up fast, but then it stops and the game looks like it hangs, but it hasn't. Then it goes to this really weird yellow stripe on the screen, though that might be expected.
2. Once I make it through that, the game is very unresponsive to my clicks - waiting 5-10 seconds for it do whatever I clicked on in some cases. The good thing is that there was no other problems, aside from the response. I was able to create a sovereign, save her, create a faction, save it, and enter a new game.
3. UPDATE: Driver seemed to take care of blurry map graphics, but no effect on graphical performance or overall game performance.
4. I'm having major sound issues as well. The music is like tripping over itself or something else in the game. It's skipping/choppy and the sound effect when I click a button repeats like it's stuck.
5. Another positive, though, is that the game did not hang or crash. I was able to build a building and interact with the interface.

I tried to tweak my system and game settings (which is how I found out about windowed mode). I did the following and will report the effect.

• Played off fresh boot - no real impact that I could tell, unless some of the progress I made was only because of that.
• Playing in Windowed Mode caused several positive effects: The startup went faster (that's how I got it to at least do disk activity in the beginning) and the cloth map graphics at least showed their colors. Before I was just in a bright field of white.
• Disabled my SB Live card - no impact on sound or game performance
• Used my SB Live card - no impact on sound or game performance
• Uninstalled my SB Live card and drivers - no impact on sound or game performance
• Checked HD for errors (just did that this morning on start up so I don't know if there were any and they got fixed or if there weren't any at all)
• Disks are defrag'ed

Hopefully I reported properly and this helps give the developers some insight.

Did I mention I'm overly excited about this game?

Edited to Update (7/1/10):

Driver version (updated to NVidia 257.21)

Added Game Resolution: Currently trying 1152x864, fullscreen mode off.

Edited:

Changed testing resolution to 1024 full screen

Also went to just basic MS USB drivers.