Yes iL2 is VERY CPU intensive... a bump up of 0.2 in CPU speed will give you about 10% more FPS... so better to OC your CPU (or upgrade your CPU) then the graphic card... Finally we dont run this sim at very high resolution anyway... and high res are where these card shine....

You are OK for your hardware. With about the same system (the difference being my E6600 @ 3.2 Ghz) and same settings my minimum fps in the track you mentioned was 16.

How well will IL2 run on my system?? Is the 8800 gt enough for IL2??

Its more than enough

you should have no problem at all

It depends on what resolution you want to run the game... If 1600 and below its plenty card. You might have to take down some of the AA and keep some AF but its a good card.

I have to say i went to nVidia also and ive been less than impressed.my old 9800pro had a better image than then 7950gt i switched too.ill be going back to ati next build.my 9800pro is still doing great in my sons old dell now and it runs everything he,s playing just fine.probly one of the best cards ever made.

How can this happen ??? The nvdia 7900 cards are faster than Radeon 9800 pro so how can the weaker 9800 pro have better graphics than the more powerful 7950gt?? Anyway i am pretty sure that my 8800gt has better image quality than a 9800 pro!!:):) Can you post some screenhots of games running with a ati card and some others screenhots of games running with nvdia card so we can make a comparission??

Frames Per Second does not equal image quality, Baxter.

Of course new cards can usually show more effects, as they are more powerful. For IL2 those cards are overkill, though. Remember, this game is 9 years old and even with the upgraded graphics, it touches the limits of your CPU much faster than those of your GPU.

The image quality shows in different aspects, though. For example: With the 8800 I have flickering textures in IL2, flickering smoke, with perfect mode and effects=2 the flak-clouds turn pink and the groundtexture moves around slightly, even when standing still on some map and mission combinations.

For LockOn, you see shimering beaches, even through the fog and the self-shadowing is crippled.


These things have nothing to do with visual effects of the game, that older graphics cards cannot show. It has rather something to do with image-quality-factors, that were accepted to push up the overall performance and frames per second.
From the marketing point of view, the masses of top-notch-brand-new-graphics-card-uses are not the few people who play IL2 or LockOn. Not even BF2 any longer, so there is no need for nVidia to fix these issues either.

Yes there are a lot more important games than L2 For example i realy need a card like this to run Crysis ith max settings. And Crysis realy needs a card like 9800gx2 to run at max settings, dosent it? With my 8800gt i dont get more than 35 fps maximum in 1280x1024 very high settings. I never played IL2 and i dont know if i will because fps and action games in general are my main interest.