Well, my my mum bought my first PC in 1999- pentium2 400MHz, 64mb RAM, 8mb Voodoo2 graphics card. 1800£. My current Dell C2D 2.66, 2Gb ram, 8800gts(now 460gtx) - 500£ two years ago.
I'm not arguing against a general statement that it was rushed, it is buggy. I am only saying that no optimisation will make it fly on high settings on average computers. I could be wrong as I only make an inference based on the past sims, but like I said, in the past ALL major sims were complete system hogs (IL2, LockOn, FS9, FSX, A10). To run them with eyecandy one had to wait several years for affordable hardware to be become powerful enough (heck, I could not run original LockOn maxed out 4 years after its release on affordable C2Duo/8800gts), or buy the absolute top of the line stuff and still turn many options down. Just like you, I have gtx460, it is a "reasonably priced card" and I never expected it to pull the weight of CoD. I'll have to wait and upgrade.
Crysis2 is amazing looking, but it has very limited play area, nowere near the 1000km sq of CoD. Wings Of Prey has small maps (50km sq?), very limited draw distance with lots of fog, almost no graphical damage modeling.
So basically, I am only saying that flight sims have always ran badly on reasonably priced systems upon their release. Such is their nature. I do not believe that some "optimisation" will change that for CoD, at least not for us with gtx460s it wont.
I think that flight sims fans have forgotten that that genre have ALWAYS demanded the most current , most expensive hardware. This is not Crysis or Need for Speed or even iRacing, the massive scale and complexity of modeled world is on a different level.
Whenever a new flight sim came out, one knew that he had to get the best PC available at the time of the release to enjoy it- original Il2, LockOn, FSX, A-10 to metion but the most recent ones and that trend was always the same.
Top of the range processors and graphics cards are a must. If you read 1c forum you will see that people with nice i7s and top radeons and nvidias are enjoying CoD now.
Completely agree! Some cars are balanced very well- I drove Seat Leon, Some Aston Martin (on time trial challenge), AE86. Some other cars are exactly like they were taken straight from Shift1 - never wanting to go straight (911, Elise). I have not tried any other cars yet.
With the "balanced cars" the only thing that stops this from being a "sim" for me is that it is a bit too easy to recover weight of the car (even the 'balanced' car), there is almost no @point of no return@. But the way cars react to acceleration, the understeer and oversteer are all in a different league to Shift1. Unfortunately I do not own a console to compare with GT or Forza.
The "unbalanced cars' feel EXACTLY like Shift1 did.
Bought a Toyota Yaris SR 1.3 about a year ago- I think its a perfect cheap small economical car (50.4 combined economy). Paid 1.5k for an Xreg. Nothing rattles, workes like clockwork (all SRs of that period were Japanese built! Some Yari are French built -booo). The engine is so smooth and quiet that I have turned the ignition key on several occasions while at the lights (with the engine running I mean). Highly, highly recommended car.
I did my research and it was rated 5 stars on Honest John, was highly praised on BMI (albeit in a modified form. Great driving position, handles well. Only downside is motorway- a bit noisy. Not rattles, but tyre noise - the wheels are a bit small after all...
Looks cool as well imho- Here is my baby
PS Diesel Yaris will do 70mpg but the car is no longer "cheap"...
Ok, I think I cracked it! Its a bug in the game that is related to the encoding bitrate. My tracks were .ogg at highest (500) kbps bitrate encoding when I had the "skip to next track after random number of seconds time". There is no skipping problem with 200 kbps .oggs.
I like to have music for replays and dont want to turn on foobar for each replay specifically. Hope the devs will adress the bug and high bitrate ogg will also be playable in the future