Keyboard Steering and Perfomance Issues: NFS Most Wanted 2012 PC

Hi there!  I recently purchased Need for Speed Most Wanted (the new one) for my new PC, and I noticed that the handling of cars is absolutely terrible.  When I steer using the directional buttons on my PC's Keyboard, it takes about half a second for it to respond.  When I try to steer normally the controls are too stiff, and I usually end up crashing into everything.  This is even after installing the patch and trying to "recalibrate controls" in the game's options menu.  Please EA and Criterion fix this by adding in a keyboard steering sensitivity option!  It is not the game's framerate that is causing this; I can play at the lowest settings and resolution (800x600) and have a great framerate but the controls are still terrible.

I have an AMD Radeon 7450 graphics card (1 GB), 10 GB of RAM and a Six-Core Processor that rounds out at 3.5 Ghz.  According to the minimum specs I should be able to run the game smoothly, but I have to turn down the graphics to the lowest possible in order for my performance to become better.  Is there anyway to fix this?  I want the game to run smooth and not look absolutely dreadful.  I'm on Windows 8 if that helps.  Do I need more RAM, a better graphics card, or both?

Any answer would be greatly appreciated.  I enjoy NFS Most Wanted very much but these problems are making the game extremely frustrating.