Actually, yes the engine does blow serious chunks. It's inconsistent and a poor use of DX9. Btw, OpenGL > DX.

The thread on the demo is up to 16 pages here, oh the suffering lol : http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=369163

Pointing out a game that is coded horribly doesn't mean anything other than that you can always find games like that. It doesn't even look impressive when you crank the details up. I can run it fairly smoothly at 1280x1024 with settings near the highest. At the same time, my venice 3000 is at 2.6ghz, when I clock it down to 1.8Ghz, it runs almost identically, which tells me that it's probably a video-card limited game anyway.

Also, a friend has an Athlon XP with a Radeon 9550, and he plays it just fine at 1024x768 (the maximum res of his 15" LCD).