Well, I've just had the best 2 hours of offline flight simming I can remember...

[ATAG_Bliss]

I get 40-60 FPS on medium settings with a quad core laptop with a 5870 card. Still looks fantastic. The potential is huge and some of those videos showing 1000+ planes in the sky at the same time has already shown that.

But even with my medium laptop, I'm enjoying it quite a bit. I'd say the majority of the problems are people having too much eye candy turned on (not saying optimization is needed as well) But every patch is making it better and better. It will get there.