It looks better then 2004 and has many other areas polished like traffic and ground traffic, water looks much better. The main problem is its a pig on resources. I have seen some reviews that mention specs but most have you wasting money. FSX is a CPU hog just like earlier games of this series. Sure you want a decent graphics card but there is no need to go SLI for this game. Ram is cheap and if you are running Vista 3-4GB is a good idea anyway. I would recommend a E8500 core 2 duo, they are cheap and can be easily clocked to 4+ which is screaming fast. And its this CPU power the game needs more then anything else, that along with 3-4 GB ram and ONE decent mid-to-high end video card will do the trick, you can run it wide open. The GTX260 has over 800+MB ram and is more then enough for this game. Think CPU-motherboard. Again I would go ASUS with a E8500 and clock to 3.7-4.2. Throw on a decent 300-400 dollar video card and even this game will be tamed.
Using your existing monitor you can build a system to deal with this game for under 1500 easy instead of spending that just on two high end video cards only to have the CPU not be able to keep up. An overclocked E8500 will smoke many of intels $800 chips with ease.
Game is awesome running wide open, if you need more power do some research first. 2 High end graphics card with an average CPU will do nothing as this game wails on CPU.
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