GTX 460 or should I wait for something better?

[ben2202]

Well to be honest i ask for comments on how it will fair...and i get a "get a bigger screen" comment....right. At least you are right on one thing , ill go look on simHQ for some more appropriate feedback if there is any to be had. Freaking tight budget indeed here and just paid 684$ can for all the hardware - video card + mid tower and 750 watt power supply. Only thing i see i could afford is +2 gig of ram really. Still i think it can run 30-40 fps on 1200x1000 resolution at least i hope.

[NedLynch]

The game runs fine on my system with win7 64 bit, even over areas with lots of buildings I get no stutters from texture loading.
Resolution 1600x900, fps anywhere between 30 - 70, depending on the area you are flying over, saw fps spike to over 90 in external view over the channel with about 8 planes on screen, more in combat at the time.
Settings are model detail high, textures original, visual effects high, everything else to medium, ssao on, clouds, shadows, roads on.

And Heliocon, could it be that you are mixing up amd gpu and cpu?

Ben, I am on a very tight budget as well, took me a very long time to buy everything little by little, my advice go with what you have, you can always expand later. I do agree though if new cards, motherboards and cpus (waiting for the bulldozer) will come out later this year prices for state of the art hardware now will fall then, and you even have an AM3+ MB already then.
However looking at especially video cards, one could almost buy a new one every half year, so settle for what you have, expand later, don't get hiped into the hardware ratrace. Only the smalest percentage of gamers can keep up with that financially, I most certainly cannot. No clue how others do it but I got bills to pay and a family to feed, oh and darn it, the family even wants a roof over their heads .

[NedLynch]

Oh sorry, Ben, keep the monitor you have, it'll be fine, I used to play on a 15inch widescreen monitor, max resolution was quite low but the picture was pristine, since it was that monitors max resolution.
If you get a higher resolution monitor and need to run at a lower resolution the picture might not look as good, generally I think you get the best picture at a monitors native resolution, so if you have a monitor with a lower native resolution you'll have a good picture and you'll free up resources in your comp at the same time.
Remember, never give into the ratrace.