My thoughts exactly.

Perhaps add to the manual "After installation it is strongly advicable to go to the official forum and get free help with tweaking or you will not be able to play the game."

And that's fine. The system specs should reflect that so that people like me don't waste money on a game we can't play. If the system requirements reflected reality, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

FWIW I'm getting very satisfactory gameplay on my Q6600 system with settings on medium. I think your CPU is better than mine.

My video card is a GTX460, 1 GB, which although the previous generation beats yours in performance. Maybe you can return your new video card and swap it for a 460. I got mine refurbished for cheaper than what new 550tis are going for.

Heh, wouldn't hurt. A few links to the forums would be helpful.

Most common complaint for newcomers is "the psychedelic instrument panel" (turn epilepsy filter to OFF). Stutters can be reduced by disabling Desktop Composition in the launcher.exe properties. Frame rates greatly boosted by turning off certain features in the sim's Options/Video menu, and turning other features down. Spitfire/Hurricane mirrors toggled to "OFF" in-game will yield many systems a jaw-dropping 10-15 fps increase, etc etc etc

Probably should have a sticky in each forum: "Before starting CoD for the first time, read this and FREAKING DO WHAT IT SAYS!" Many of us have got CoD running very well (per the many YouTube videos), but a lot of tweaking and head scratching came first for lots of us.

I have to think future patches will address this. Firing up a new sim should give you an "Aha - moment"; not a "WTF! - nightmare". LOL

Well, good news! I was able to return the game. Steam was kind enough to make an exception to their normal policies and issue a credit.