Apparently it was created when devolopers were assuming that cpu speeds would keep going up in GHz with single or dual cores. But what actually happened is that cpu clocks plateaued for quite a while, but things like cores increased. The game doesn't use more than 1-2 cores at most so the max setting won't run well unless you have like a 5ghz per core cpu.

At least I'm pretty sure that's what's up.