Well, OK, Martin, perhaps there is more than 1 person here qualified to talk about this.
I up front totally disagree with you that the 1060 is a "low-end" GPU. I, in fact, would call it mid-to-high end, discounting the new and not-debugged-enough RTX series, it is only out-performed by the 1070 and 1080 series. Here's the GPU Benchmarks to prove my point:
GTX1080 .... 12,385
GTX1070 .... 11,291 .....< ACC's recommended GPU
GTX1060 .... 9,061
GTX1060 .... 7,734 .....<(MaxQ 6GB) my GPU and 3x faster than the minimum
GTX 1050Ti...5,981
GTX460 ..... 2,654 ..... < This is ACC's minimum GPU
Wow!! A lot of people out there with a 1050Ti or less. Most people, that is. They won't be racing on this game in multiplayer with more than 10 cars displaying even with turning off all the good graphics.
As for the CPU, I posted the note about CPU load without digging further because I was rather shocked. No other game, rFactor2, PC2, or anything else I have comes close to working the CPUs like that. That's really all you need to know to know it's surprising.
But to get to the facts, the CPU has a Passmark benchmark of 12,460. ACC's recommended CPU is benchmarking ~12,700. So it's inaccurate at best to portray my CPU as under-powered or to say, "oh, it's a mobile"....
As someone whose career includes over 20 years coding, though these days mostly web sites but including 2 years of PC Assembler programming, yes, I am shocked at the CPU load here (compare it to rFactor2 which is DX11, too).
Check for yourself the 2 screen prints I'm posting to give the background and I think my initial shock is more than well supported. I would guess that when they turn on CPU optimizations that should make the code ~30% more efficient hopefully, and not sure if some of that can be offloaded to the GPU, but my GPU is already relatively maxed out, too. This is amazing given that, in my opinion, Paul Ricard on rFactor2 looks better than Paul Ricard on ACC (which is a shame).
I'm pretty sure CPU optimizations alone won't solve the load problem, meaning they might have to drop some calculations on lower cpus. I'd say they've under-specced this on the Steam Store Page.
Before posting the screen captures, there's still the 2 horrendous graphics problems I described. Anyone else seeing the full spread of grain/marbles on the grass near the track, where the marbles don't move with the grass? I've only had this since 0.5.1 or so and it's very distracting.
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System Load graph from Task Manager:
You can see on the next graph where I stopped ACC in the middle (about 2 minutes prior to taking the pic). The CPU cores were obviously heavily loaded; though 69% in the above graph at that moment.
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