better than the first?
the first one is considered by many people as a great RPG but actually beside dialogs and story it was just button smashing
if they wanted to follow RPG general classic rules like the performance is dependent by attributes of characters and not by dexterity of the player then they should have made it semi turn based battles more char skills and a party than a single hero guy (a bit like DAO or Baldurs Gate)
the witcher2 on other hands gets rid of stupid button smashing and is more action orientated
i would call it action adventure with RPG elements
the fights are definitely better than of part one
can't tell much of the story because i did not played more than 1.5 chapters yet
does it require powerful PC?
there were some performance issues on release version that got improved by patches
but yeah it needs some performance