So that game you've been waiting for finally comes out.  You've read the previews of it.  You've watched video demos of it. You've lived through the delays and the you now have the box in your hands.

You install it and start to play it and then you make the discovery -- your computer isn't fast enough to run it.  You thought you had a good computer but no, no it turns out that you have to lower the display settings way down to play the game.

Why is this the case? The answer is this: Marketing.  There is little value in making a game run well on your computer because game developers aren't punished for not having optimized their code as long as the game will run on your machine with lower settings. 

And if you complain about that, you will be told that your one-year old video card is "ancient" and told to "get a new video card".

Which is a shame because most games could run much faster than they do if there was a good reason to optimize for it.  When Sins of a Solar Empire comes out, people will no doubt marvel at its great graphics. But will anyone (or any review) make notice that it has state of the art graphics and can run on older machines? People in the beta have certainly noticed how fast the game runs despite having better graphics than a number of shipping games with cutting edge graphics. I.e. it runs faster with better graphics than many shipping high end games. 

Are turn-based strategy gamers different? We'll be able to gauge by the 1.6 release.  Around 200 engineering hours have gone into just performance tuning for 1.6.  The mini map has been rewritten in Direct3D and we've back ported some of our new game engine features from our upcoming fantasy strategy game (which has crazy advanced graphics technology but that's another story). 

The net result is 1.6 should be a major jump in performance over 1.5X.  That isn't to say there aren't a bunch of other cool feautres in 1.6. There certainly are.  But performance is where the bulk of the work has gone.  New features (real meaty ones anyway) will have to wait until 1.7 it appears.