If it's CPU limited on a rolling demo, how is it going to handle economic stuff, control monitoring, clipping, busier scenes, etc?
The game IS CPU limited, sadly. They took the Reunion engine, and build around that, and it was single core. So your dual core doesn't really do much.
On my system the game runs fine at 1680x1050, everything max, 4xfsaa 8xaf, though some sectors with 9 million asteroids run a bit slower than usual.
After the 1.2.1 hotfix, combat is smooth too, though the engine has an annoying tendency to have to reload everything for every sector - like weapons fire and missile sounds etc. So if you hear a sound for the first time in a busy battle, it'll freeze for 2 seconds or so. It doesn't happen often, but just enough to be really irritating.
I'll run the demo, see what it does.
Creston