Win7 has an XP mode. Really no reason to be on XP. If you like XP so much, you can run XP mode and have full Win7 capabilities and the XP experience you are familiar with.

My system is a quad-core hyper threaded machine with a current video card. CPU usage runs anywhere from 20 to 48%, typically chilling at 30%. I don't consider this game CPU intensive whatsoever. I run a 4.6GHz i7-2600k.

Now my GPU is another story. For whatever reason, the title screen (which is just white with very hard to see smoke effects at the bottom; seriously why?) can ramp the usage up to 40% and change my idle temps of 26C to 35C. In game it's at 60C constant. I'm running everything max except the drawing preferences. I leave those standard (cause for no reason one option up on any of those drops FPS a ton). Without v-sync on I can run 45-150+FPS throughout the game but there is TERRIBLE tearing. It's disgusting the v-tear in this game during cut scenes. With v-sync forced It will typically throttle 35-40FPS during intensive areas and 60FPS for everything else. I use just one GTX 560ti 1GB 950MHz.

Imma go ahead and just assume a ton of debugging is going on so this why we have most lag. But I can't think of any type of debugging that would cause this type of GPU strain.

I never bothered to see how much RAM the game used at start and after extended game play. I'll look now on.

Once the major issues have been dealt with (you know, content and making a game that's fun), I would love for SE to optimize it to run as great as it can run. Cause right now it is very taxing.