[Xaphod]

Here's some additional information from our Beta Preview

A lot of you are probably wondering about the way the game performed on my setup, which is likely considered to be the minimum system requirements for the game at present. Well, let me assure anyone with similar specs to mine should not have a problem. Self-shadowing, normal mapped characters, reflections, waves, texture detail, crew, and all running successfully and very playable at 1280x1024. The screenshots illustrating this article show how acceptable the quality is. City of Villains was jerkier overall on my machine. It ran fine in a window as well.
The only slowdowns present occurred while new areas or details were being loaded into memory. I’m informed that’s mostly to do with there only being 128mb of texture memory on my graphics card, and that if I reduced the details a bit it would mitigate that. I’m also aware that FLS will be optimising the client software further in the future. Normally this wasn’t any kind of problem but (likely because I continued to run at high detail) I have experienced a few longish slowdowns, particularly in the navigation zone. Ship to ship combat is experienced without pauses or slowdowns or jerkiness. It’s beautiful, and sounds as good as it looks. Not sure if it was myself or the devs, but I think at least one of us must've sold something important to some demon guy to get performance like that.

I did find that the default settings of the game caused it to lag a fair bit, but with some minor tweaking it was running as smooth as anything, while the graphics remained stunning. There are clearly tweaks still to be done, but this does not feel like a game in early(ish) beta.