Most graphic intensive games that are used as benchmarks (like Crysis for example) are not well-suited to simulator benchmarking.
The reason is that the fundamental differences in the gameplay are reflected in totally different processing demands: they run much smaller maps, they don't need multi-layered AI that has to take advantage of 3 dimensions to be of any challenge, they don't need to model as many different parameters for what the player controls, etc.
That being said, i too would be interested to know how to maximize performance on mid-range rigs. I use an i7 920 at stock speeds (2.7Ghz) on an Asus P6T deluxe motherboard, 3GB of DDR3 RAM in a triple channel kit (i skipped vista and installed XP when i built it so no use going for a lot of RAM, i now run win7 64 however) and an Ati 4890 1GB.
I'm not really keen on overclocking the CPU for a variety of reasons and i really can't afford a DX11 GPU upgrade. I might bump up the RAM a bit though and since i have a second triple channel capable bank, it would make sense to go for 6 GB. That will have to wait until the first round of optimization patches and some community feedback, but it's a cheap and worthwhile upgrade overall.
In the grand scheme of things i'm not really worried since i don't expect to run this on high settings, more like medium to high and tweaking it to get 30-40 FPS across the board to maintain playability.
The only thing that's causing me concern is the 4890. Since the game runs in DX10, does anyone know how a 4890 1GB fares when compared to a mid-range DX11 card running DX10? I seem to remember the first DX11 GPUs (eg, 57xx,56xx) actually being slower than the late generation DX10 cards like the 4890, but with so many people running GTX 460/470/equivalent 5xx and similar Ati/AMD models i need some frame of reference to those GPUs to roughly know what to expect.
Any ideas?
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