So, Nehalem is OK?

[TheFamilyMan]

So, Nehalem is OK? (course correction back to the OP)

Buying a core 2 duo/quad system now locks you into tech that is at end of life. There won't be any significantly faster/better CPUs in this line, or socket, coming out in the months ahead. In this regard Nehalem is the way to go, but it's worth waiting a few months for one if you can.

As for dual/quad processing. Being a software developer whose been developing multi-threaded multi-processor, and multi-host applications for years now, I can't imagine Oleg's team developing a sim that does not fully take advantage of the potential computational environment that multi-core CPUS provide. In this I mean that the sim could be designed to scale across as many cores as are available. As an example, consider that each AI aircraft (or online for that matter) were a separately schedulable execution thread (that's the way I'd design it, and I've done this exact sort of thing with analytic sims professionally). With proper design, each of these threads would drift off to the least busy core to execute, and thus more cores give you that much more AI computational bandwidth.

And finally a word to those who think vsync is for sissy: you are deluding yourselves. Why? A computer creates animation in the exact same manner as a film movie, i.e. animation is a series of still pictures shown at a fixed rate which when viewed by the human eye appear to create an image that moves. That fixed rate for a computer is the maximum refresh rate of your monitor. When vsync is turned off, the computer is allowed to display one of the still pictures on the monitor while the computer is still filling in that same picture, thus creating one or more tear lines in the displayed image (the previous image is overwritten during the fill operation). And even if you are not seeing tearing, the max rate that the picture changes on your monitor is its max refresh rate: all those FPS that exceed your monitor's refresh rate are NEVER even displayed! What vsync does is lock the update of a picture such that it won't be displayed until the update is complete; but there is also more than one picture buffer, so one is being displayed while one or more are being updated. But hey, that warm fuzzy feeling of seeing that FRAPS display of 140 fps (and don't forget that hefty average) on your 75htz monitor can't be beat...right?

Edit: Potentially insulting slurs removed (see below)