Perfect Mode - advice from designers, please?

[mango42]

I am using an Alienware m9700 to play IL2 '46, version 4.08m. It has twin 7900GS SLI video cards, 2Gb RAM and 2.4GHz AMD CPU running XPpro SP2 (but longing for a native Linux version!)

However when I set hardwareshaders=1, water=2, forest=2 or 3 trying to play it is more like watching a fast slideshow, even with only my own plane in the mission. Using the built-in FPS meter shows an average of 40-60 (Vsync ON) and a minimum of 24-30fps, so the bottleneck would appear to be the CPU...

Is this to be expected with such a rig or has something gone wrong with my set-up? Without hardwareshaders=1 the sim plays fine, even with 40-50 planes in the mix.

If it wasn't for the 'pop-up' scenery on mountainous maps, I wouldn't mind not using Perfect mode - but it sure looks gorgeous.

I'll post my conf.ini if anyone in the know feels they can help me towards full immersion in this very best of flight simulators. I'm trying to avoid a hardware upgrade until SOW comes out...

Thanks in advance,

mango