As usual nothing is black and white.
My rig is a little of an overkill regarding the CPU for what Il2 is concerned. As I mentioned before I have a QX9770 which at the moment is the fastest you can buy at an uneconomical price for sure. Stock you get 4 cores running at 3.2 MHZ with huge cache memory and FSB at 1600 which is also the max you can get. Some overclocking is easily done without special cooling and you can run at 3.4 even 3.6 MHZ. I use a Zalman CNPS9700LED cooler which is excellent.
Unfortunately IL2 runs on one core only. So if IL2 was multithreaded and I hope SOW-BOB will be so then I would get the full use out of the investment.
I also suppose that IL2 even if improved since the beginning, does not use best the available power of the GTX280 with DirectX10. The last DLL with graphic improvements are now nearly a year old if I am not wrong.
A less expensive double core at similar frequencies should have similar results with the same graphic board.
Someone in this thread mentioned that he hoped I did not use this rig only for IL2. He is right I also played COD4 and some more graphically advanced games. I did play a little Lock On and I can tell that the FPS all to the max (3D shadows, exhaust heat, max quality of water etc.) are stellar and fluidity is perfect but I love propellers and close air combat.
Shooting down airplanes over the visual horizon with missiles is not my style and when you go at those jet speeds everything is simply too fast to have the time to feel the heat. I strongly appreciate the power with Adobe Photoshop CS2 which uses all cores and 3DMax which also make good use of all this power.
But it is a hobby activity and not professional which makes it all the more agreable.
My next dream would be three 30" screens to cover central and lateral views (not the way it is done in IL2 which is unrealistic) with the same performance I have today. It is doable with three GTX280 each one driving a full 30" screen. You would not need SLI. Only the game should be programmed such as to produce the data to feed three synchronized image channels. The four CPU cores would then be perfectly used.
Oleg if you read me do not forget this function in BoB-SoW!!!.
I do not know which motherboard would allow this but god it would be heaven.
Gold
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