Well, the engine is not optimized properly to demand such a high system requirements.. The tracks are from rF, no more complex. The car models are the same range, nothing there either. It could be that rF2 is only aimed at those who have top notch rig and huge amount of cash just lying around. With average gear the message from ISI seems to be: "stay out, we don't want to play with you." The average gaming computer is not even yet i3 series, we only have that misconception living in EU that it's i7 or nothing. There's literally millions of gamers from Asia that still go with single cores.. So aiming at high now seems like the stupidest strategy ever. Lower spec games are enjoying a success.
Greetings Kennett
I think the Corvette is the only ISI car left atm which I really don't like at all; since you spoke about not liking the demo. I think I would not like it either if I was using that to try the game, but I mostly really like the actual game
About the reqs:
I used the game for the most time with my Core 2 Duo E8400 which I got for about 40€ from ebay a couple of years ago, together with my HD6870, which is a last-generation mid-range card.
It was fine for running the game on mostly high-settings with 60-90 fps on all the tracks that were available back then.
A key thing for me with this GPU was (and still is) to not use reflections and not too much AA, this way it was very stable.
I upgraded later to an i5, but still using the same GPU and got a fps boost of about 40-50% with the same settings, running at a pretty much fixed 120 fps now, so I think the sim is quite CPU heavy.
I'm personally not feeling left out because I pass on some effects to reach my desired framerate for low input-lag fluid gaming, until I got a better GPU sometime in the future.
And since you mention millions in asia; I'm pretty sure that rf2 isn't exactly a mass-market game. It definatly woudn't be the case with low system reqs either
Even though you are defintaly right about car-models not beeing that special and track-models neither (until Silverstone and Mores came around
), I think aiming at high now in theory is still a logical thing when you plan to have the game around for many more years to come, therefore having the system-req. problem slowly solving itself over time