[chonker]

Heh, no not CRTs, I've 3 x 4:3 19" tft's. having 3 widescreens just makes the overall size of the rig too large (and 4:3's are so cheap nowadays).

I just noticed the steam version seems to be stuck at 4.09. I have manually updated to 4.11 hoping that would help but unfortunately it hasn;t.

I should have mentioned I have a second graphics card in for the extra dvi/vga ports I need as my GTX480 only has two dvi's. It's just an old 8400GS. I usually use softth to play rFactor, which as I understand does all the rendering on the primary card and just uses the second card for the ports, but now I'm thinking IL2 is rendering on that old card causing the issue.

As a test I switched to my other display profile with a 16:10 monitor on the GTX480 and ran it at 1920x1200 and it seems to run smoothly.

<--- edit --->

Okay I just changed my display settings so that my centre screen (which is connected through the GTX480) is primary and it runs fine, but only displaying on the centre and right screens so it looks like it was rendering on the 8400GS giving the horrible FPS.

Will have to have a think about the best way to sort this out now, as I need the middle screen to be on the GTX480 for softth dx9 games. It's a shame softth doesn't seem to work (I've seen forum posts from people saying they've succeeded with it but I've tried and failed) as I think that would be a solution. I think I may end up with a couple of monitor switchboxes to swap connections between the left/middle screens as each of the screens has 2 inputs.