Just got my US copy yesterday.
I was pleasantly surprised that I seem to be one of the lucky ones with a
lower-end system that can run the game fairly well.
I'm running:
Windows XP pro sp1
Athalon Xp 2800
1024 MB PC-3200 dual channel
Gainward Geforce 5900XT ultra 128mb (factory OC @450mhz core 780mhz memory)
I havent used fraps as I don't see a need. It runs smooth with everything
on high in the less poulated systems. In heavy-combat with multiple ships
it takes a pretty good hit and I did have a lockup forcing a hard reboot
once in this scenario.
In the heavily populated systems it gets pretty slow, so I turned the shaders
down to low and this helped quite a bit. I get a pretty bad stutter the first time I fire a weapon and when a ship blows up. Overall, not too bad considering I was anticipationg a slideshow.
The only things I've found so far (8hrs) that I would consider bugs:
Every so often I get dropped back to the desktop when loading a save,
this has always been after I die.
I occasionally notice some seemingly random charachters showing up
in some of the menus.
My impressions after 8 hours of play:
-I love the new sector layouts.
-I don't really care for all the blue boxes targetting everything as it gets
confusing.
-I love the new sound effects.
-I think that the menus are a little too busy and transperancy makes them
hard to read.
-The strafe-drive is great now.
-The new missiles are actually useful now.
-I love the way you claim ships now as you don't have to worry about all
your new captures being destroyed by the guys you are still fighting.
-I love the fact that when a ship drops freight, they actually drop freight
insted of just mosquitos.
-The new weapons are awesome.
- I love some of the new ship models, notice I said some.
I haven't done much trading, so I can't really comment on that yet.
Don't get me wrong, there is still much room for improvement (come on 1.3

but it's definitely is not as bad as alot of people have made it out to be. At this point I'd give X3 a 7 out of 10.
When all the issues are fixed I'm sure that X3 will be the most fun I've had
with X since the mid-nineties.
