All hail the great god of Polycounts

Let me bounce a few numbers around to give some weight to the very pertinent points raised by VS.

IL2 / FB .... polycounts for the high detail model are around 2500. The same number, or a fraction mode, goes into the cockpit.

SFP1 .... 6-7000 polys for the high detail

CFS3 .....Some of the add-on's have 20,000 + !!!! You see useless spheres with perfect roundness used to make blisters...all sorts of rubbish.

Ironically, they have less impact on the speed of a game than you might think! What killed FR's for me on CFS3 was the scenery low down. Wouldn't have minded if it was pretty....

Anyway, for me, it is quantity of planes that give immersion. Play a dogfight in Rowans old Battle of Britain, and the skies are full of dogfighting. You can ignore the low-poly planes because if you spend time looking at the pretties, the fight is very short...and you be dead

Modern graphic cards have got so good at pushing the polygons around that modern sims can throw a lot more polygons around that they used to. Where things go wrong is when the new power is used.

I think 2500 polys is a good figurefor a plane...IL2 aircraft look pretty enough for even the 'external view' merchants. Where sims need to increase their expenditure of polygons is in terrain dressing! Swoop down over the battlefields of flanders and what should you see. Trenches. Men. Shell holes. Gun batteries, shattered villages, and above all... MOVEMENT!

And in the air...well, clouds that block the AI's line of sight would be nice...and ones that know how to fly their planes properly! Nothing worse than an AI that thinks it can turn fight a zero in a B17