Hej,
been playing CMSF for a couple of months now. I'm one of those people who refuses to spent hundreds of euro on an up-to-date pc just to enjoy the fancy new improvements on some game.
The notebook I use currently I bought in January 2005 with components who probably came out in 2004. So it's pretty old. But I could play CMSF on it. During intense firefights there of course was fps drops sometime, but generally performance was acceptable. And I love the game for that.
But the new v1.07 patch messed the whole game up for me. After updating my graphic card drivers I get some weird graphical error when ever I start CMSF (doesn't happen with other games). In the menu everything is fine again. When trying to play the game sometimes I get CTD when only clicking on a unit. Even with the ATI click thingie turned on, I still get the same CTD. Sometimes after 30secs sometimes after 5mins. In addition to that performance is much worse. Even with everything on 'fastest' the performance during the setup phase the game is like what I experienced with prev-1.07 during heavy firefights. So basically unplayable.
I understand you guys have to make the game look nice to compete with all the fancy graphics of new games. But that's pretty much the death sentence for people wiht older systems (and I'm sure there were a few like me playing CMSF)