I going to buy new PC - any advises? ...

[:FI:Scott]

Its pretty safe to say that IL2 prefers Nvidia gear. The fact that the best quality water ('4') can only be used with a Nvidia GPU is proof enough.

Now that Oleg has confirmed that SOW will be a DirectX game instead of openGL the playing field is open. At the moment I think it is fair comment that Ati have the fastest cards on the market (do Nvidia even have a DX11 card out yet ?). Nvidia haven't been showering themselves with glory on the driver front recently either. Their latest certified drivers had to be hastily recalled due to bug which fried a lot of peoples cards because of a bug in the fan control and the set before that was pretty much slated for being as buggy as hell, to the point that I didn't install it.

Nvidias latest may give them back the edge but at a price. I've been a Nvidia user since pre IL2 days, but when I spec up another machine in a year or two's time they will really have to wow me rather than selling on the back of 'better the devil you know'. Looking at IL2 specifically ROF, Flaming Cliffs 2, SOW on the horizon all say to me I don't want to build a machine with an eight year old game in mind. On that I suppose its horses for courses.