I am making critical discoverys this week
Well...not frikkin rocket science BUT I tell you what...the new patch (4.00 and above) knocks the HELL outta older CPU's
I have a 2800XP 1gig and X800 Pro. It's all overclocked....rock solid. Walks IL-2 until there's LOTS of sea.
Rias has an XP2600 1 gig and a bog standard OEM Radeon 9000 (not a pro...vanilla £25 card)
Although she has no AA or AF on, it flies SWEET AS
I ALWAYS thought....and I mean ALWAYS thought, that this game was ok on lower spec cpu's.
Not any more.
This third PC is struggling. Badly.
Example coming up:
This pc is an XP1gig running either 1333 or 1400 clock. It's on 133 fsb, and SDR ram. 768 meg of it.
It has in it a Radeon 9700 Pro. 128mb DDR ram. Pretty serious card really, tad lower than a 9800 Pro...but HUGELY more powerfull than the 9000 OEM.
I have been watching VERY SLOW FPS on this machine SO I dropped the video settings...and I mean DROPPED THEM,
Using Team Speak Overlay (vote: best software this year or what?) I watched the FPS on tracks such as Black Death.
Max settings in game (no AA or AF in the radeon control panel...just game maxed out) fsp varied from 28 down to 12.
Dropped it to the BOTTOM...really really low....lowest possible...so the game looks like a water colour by a 3year old chimp..
same frame rates!
OK...1 or 2 higher...possibly. But nothing worthy. At all.
Frankly: This Athlon 1400, fresh install of XP, running Windows like LIGHTNING (likeI said...fresh clean install) .runs like a slide show.
Which is WHY everyone had such a bad lag problem last night on my server. Sorry guys.
Simple fact: it don't cut the mustard..which MEANS...I gotta bring the beast with me

which weighs a TON.
Or get a new system.....hmm.......