
This game should be nowhere near as hardware dependent as those two games. I think my problem must be the shared ram for graphics. the core i7 and 8 GB of RAM should be way more than enough but I wouldn't have bought a laptop with shared RAM.
I should try it on my desktop machine upstairs. It has a 1 GB graphics card and 8 GB of ram. It's an older AMD quad core but that shouldn't be an issue.