Re: taking things out - Luthier did say as much some time back. Along the lines that they had built a 2013 game and were having to scale back features to get it to work with 2011 systems.

There is also the dynamic campaign and DX11 which are more 'not being put in' (initially) rather than 'taken out'.

Haven't heard anything on CPU V GPU either. Il-2 was, but COD may be more evenly balanced with the extra eye candy? Expect we'll have to wait and see.

He wrote that on Facebook btw.

Just remember kids, it's easier to upgrade you GPU/add another one than swap the whole mb/processor/memory deal!

I'm personally waiting for the sandy bridge mobos in april, since the sweet spot in cost/performance/overclocking is there at the moment.
Maybe even wait till may/june and see how bulldozers perform and are priced.

1156 & AM3 are just dead ends for future upgrades. :(

At this point, I wouldn't even be considering the upgradeablity of the motherboard. The last time I successfully upgraded a CPU without replacing the MB was Thunderbird.

My most recent upgrade, I was going to swap out an early Core 2 with 4GB Ram for a Wolfdale and more 8GB ram, and a 64 Bit OS. Didn't work at all, and I ended up doing what was effectively a full backbone replace, for a Core 2, after Nephalim was out. It would have cost me the same to just go for an I5.

Now I'm not an expert oin the workings of the typical multi-core CPU, but Luthier and Oleg said there was support for multiple CPU's.

Now you have a 4 core processor. Lets say that Windows seven is being a big of a hog and is eating an entire core. You have three left, shouldn't those three remaining processors have enough processing power to keep 100+ AI aircraft and all the different ground objects in the air?

I'm sort of having a hard time comprehending something other than industry video rendering software or military level sims using more processing power than 3 x 2.5-3.5GHZ CPU's can offer.

Can someone school me here?

Well the question is, how many cores is CoD going to utilize? It's quite probable that it is only coded to run with 2 cores, just like most games. It becomes very hard, and time consuming coding a game to utilize more than that (I think it was Mazex that was talking about this awhile ago). But still a quad core is better than a dual. While the game is running all out on those 2 cores, the other 2 will be running Windows in the background. Thats the way i look at it at least...

I'm pretty sure Luthier wrote somewhere that the new engine does or can use multiple cores, but is only utilizing two at the moment. Don't quote me on that though, I just remember reading it here somewhere and getting the impression their going multi-core wasn't going to improve things much. It does still mean though (if the new angine uses anything more than one core) that using a quad-core processor would be better than using a dual core.

In regards to multi-core programming, I'm no expert either, so apart from the obvious thing of having your operating system or other applications running on one core while IL-2 runs on another (or others), I can only go by what others have said about the difficulty of programming an application to use multiple cores. And, apparently, for games, it's not that easy.

My basic understanding of it is that the dynamic, inter-related nature of the information that has to be processed when playing a game is different to the sort of straightforward processing that's required when doing something that just requires breaking up one task into chunks and processing them separately. So, you can't just do something like set a core to work out what the planes are doing and another to work out the weather, as they have to communicate their respective states to each other before they know what they should do next. Whereas if the processing is done in a more traditional, linear way, whereby the data doesnt have to be split off to separate cores then recompiled, the programming can also be more straightforward, incorporating that interconnectedness of elements, at the cost of your application remaining dependent on the sheer speed of your processor core/s, not their number.

I hope that makes sense, and that it's not all totally wrong, it's just my limited understanding of it, for whatever that's worth.

And at the risk of stretching things too far, while I'm here. There's a term called 'parallel processing' that's sort of related to this. In crude terms, having all cores of your CPU working on one task is parallel processing. But when it comes to parallel processing, your GPU in your video card is actually something in the order of a hundred times faster at parallel processing than any CPU. NVidia has been pushing this aspect of their video-cards lately, calling them General Purpose GPU's (GPGPU's). And with selected applications, ie video-rendering, it is indeed faster to have your video-card doing the parallel processing than your CPU's. The difference, again, though, is that parallel processing requires the application's code to be written in such a way that the data you're dealing with can be split, processed and recompiled, and that's generally not how game-engine code is written. So, in the end, and to put it very simplistically, it's sort of like, the GPU and CPU hardware has been advanced to the point where they can do things that weren't possible before, but the programming tools to take advantage of them haven't.

Again, sorry to all the experts who actually know about this stuff, was just offering my opinion.

With ILR2 the trackIR process likes to be allocated its own core.

Otherwise head tracking can freeze whenever the game gets busy (for example during a dogfight), which is annoying to say the least.