You rly think that a 3 years old GPU and a 5 years old CPU with matching amount of Ram is too much or even superb ?
That's the system i use(well got a new CPU half a year ago, but that doesn't matter in ESF, as long as you have at least 2 Cores) to develope ESF and i allways keep the FPS around 60 or even above at MAX settings. Your internet connection plays a far bigger role in a game wich depends on reflexes and speed(good hardware can't compensate high ping and it never will)
About that part anime/manga based game doesn't need great graphics, sure right, but i'm not talking about eye candy. Some newer stuff had to be used to maintain 60fps on even on my system. Like geometry shaders for particles or using the gpu to animate the models, pre gtx200 gpu's are just crappy slow at those parts.
And the specs didn't change that much, still CPU with sse2. Just you need two cores because we have some heavy CPU stuff going on wich needs to run in another thread, like the ocean waves calculations. Sure they could run on the main thread/core aswell but then you need at least 3ghz single core and all CPU's with such a clock are multicore.
The Shadermodel 3 still stands, as stated above some parts of it are just ******* slow on first and 2nd gen dx9(Shader Model 3)
