Nvidia had excellent OpenGL support which accounted for their edge over ATI. Since SOW is going the DX9/10/11 route I imagine it will be even footing again. Like I said before, there were countless games ATI ran just as well or better than Nvidia, and they all had that "Nvidia" logo at the beginning.

Nvidia better get their act together and stop worrying about getting their logo on games. Nobody buys Call of Duty/MOH/WOW, sees the Nvidia logo, and then goes out and buys an Nvidia card. People who are smart enough to buy and install a video card are smart enough to look at a GPU chart and see that there are better options for less money that Nvidia's current offerings.

Personally I want to see them regain some ground from ATI so that ATI will drop their prices even further.

Won't the Hyperlobby make a place for Storm Of War right after it comes out just like they did with the 2001 IL-2 Demo and so on. Hyperlobby is the only way to go for online play...right?

The "problem" is an dated engine using an less used API, and slow solution delivery by ATI regards to drivers issues.

People confuse that with the illogical believes like "ATI runs worse IL-2 than NVIDIA" and "Water=4 in NVIDIA has a HUGE difference over Water=2 in ATI".

Those things don't happens with modern VGAs. They have PLENTY of horsepower to runs IL-2 at the maximum level with only the drops in performance induced by the dated engine, even in NASA computers.

SoW : BoB = DX10, DX11 = standard for game development today = ATI and NVIDIA performing at the same level, with minor gains for one side, as in ANY other title...

Things are simple.

I would expect SOW not to need Hyperlobby at all.

Really? There would be a base gathering point and then other arenas?

Of course SOW needing HL. Dont you fly VR - Virtual Battlefield, Vow, Blue VS Red ect? So of course SOW will be justified in HL. Just because some believe a product they have not seen yet is fantastic, is no reason to be naive.
I want to belive SOW will be good. But I dont know before I have seen it. Will it be complete - No I dont think so. But in time - mabye - like IL2 1946. One can only hope :D

It will all depend on how SoW ios played online.For all we know it could be a system similar to RoF,through master servers.A seriously flawed system that would be...

Here's a screen of the Hyperlobby for people who may not realize the amount of online play that IL-2 gets. Probably very few. When Storm Of War comes out about two weeks later probably half to three quarters of the population of Hyperlobby will have purchased it and IL-2 1946 will become what IL-2 2001 has become, a classic sim that will be loads of fun for people with older systems. Thousands of Storm Of War converts have got to go some where to fly in the new "Spits VS 109s", "Warclouds" and other Dogfight arenas not to mention the online wars etc. and I don't think they can do it without the Hyperlobby.

Oleg has already mentioned a global dedicated server set up, some time ago as I recall.

I think HL will be redundant, but we will just have to wait and see.

I hope so. I don't like it when other programms have to run in background and eat recources.
Anyway, the hyperlobby looks a bit too outdated compared to the high visual standard of SoW BoB.