The (gory) technical details

All visual effects turned off.

Every option except AA turned on. No difference except with lighting and shadows.

Jade Empire is pretty easy on the hardware requirements. Yes, you do need a proper DX9 card with Shader Model 2.0 support, but this is a very common requirement today, and anyone who can't meet this requirement is either using a work system to play, or is well overdue for a system upgrade! Beyond that, almost anything goes, and the manufacturer's recommended system is definitely going to run everything fine at a solid frame rate. Even the listed minimum system was able to play the game fine if you turned off the extra graphics options - and the visual differences are very minor. The only problem we encountered was that in heavy combat situations with lots of spell effects, the frame rate can dip below 15fps on the minimum system.

You'll also find a few puzzles to solve, but they are not that complex.

Visuals (with the exception of the cutscenes) have been overhauled when the game was ported over, and while a slight lack of polygons in the backgrounds and some low-res textures here and there do betray the origins of the game, Jade Empire on the PC definitely looks fine. Graphics options are a bit limited - resolutions are supported up to 1920x1200 and proper widescreen support is included, but beyond that you can just choose to enable or disable soft shadows, anti-aliasing, bloom lighting, frame buffer effects and focus trails. Also, at the time of this review, ATI graphics card users have to make a decision between anti-aliasing and bloom effects - both won't work properly at the same time due to driver limitations.

The frame rate is still hard locked to 30 fps, as it was on the Xbox. According to BioWare this was done to avoid gameplay glitches, but if your hardware can do better, and wish to do so, you can remove the limiter by editing game's ini files - with the disclaimer that you may encounter some issues if you do so.