How much does a rig like that cost a fella..?

I'm thinking about a total new upgrade, and maybe use my current rig for work..

Miguel, of the clan Miguel

I have to say shadows for me are not a hughe fps killer, for me it's clouds, but they are not final yet.
Shadows give a great sense of immersion and make the scenery look a lot more life like, clouds I want on as well, not so much for the eye candy but it's a realism option for a reason.
Without clouds with medium to high settings, textures original, I rarely drop below 50 fps, clouds on (heavy clouding, I think the highest setting is medium clouds) and I am at 30, 35 fps with drops into the 20s when following a bomber formation through the clouds.

Oh, and vertigo, if you think about upgrading maybe it's good to wait a little, Ivybridge is on the horizon, though bulldozer seems to be a dud, there will be another generation of pcus from amd with new sockets (FM2), maybe new video cards (for pcie x16 3.0).

I for my part will at least sit tight until January.

I have about the same performance on my just upgraded computer.
i2500k, gtx570, 80gb SSD for a grand total of $708. Next year after a few months of Ivey Bridge and the new generation GPU's I'll get a whole new setup. I run 1680*1050 so a 580 with 3gb would've been overkill. Even at stockspeeds this gives me between 35 and 45fps in the QMB over London intercept with everything at the highest settings, mirrors off. Everywhere else it's pretty much 50 to 60fps where my vsync limits me. Right now getting the latest and the greatest is not going to give you much more performance over one or two tiers below the best. Once the SLI issues are sorted out and the code has ben optimized it's time to get some serious hardware.