So I just spent a little while tweaking FSK to run well on my system. There are a TON of guides out there for tweaking FSX but none of them seem up to date. Basically 90% of the info in them was not applicable to my machine. I thought I'd post what my setup is as it may help someone with a modern machine trying to set this thing up

My rig:

i7 950 overclocked to 4.0GHz
ATI HD5850 GPU
eyefinity running 5760x1080
Win 7 64bit
FSX Deluxe SP2

I attached my config. Here's the items that made big changes to my frame rates. Every setting affected it a little but these had MASSIVE impact on my frame rate. Unless otherwise stated my settings as those recommended in the online guides.

Settings - Display - Graphics
=============================
DX10 - Absolutely terrible. Graphics flicker, disappear at random and otherwise look terrible. 20fps penalty. It's off.
Light Bloom - Can't tell much of a visual difference but it cost 10+ fps. It's off.
Set anti-aliasing to bilinear and do not select the anti-aliasing box. Force AA in the driver. This gained me 7fps over checking it in-sim.

Settings - Display - Aircraft
=============================
This setting was interesting. I set all three exterior settings to "on" with no frame rate penalty at all. AND it looks great with the self-shadowing! Most online guides say to turn this off. I didn't need to.

Settings - Display - Scenery
============================
The "terrain and water" section was interesting. Basically I can max out all of these settings with zero fps penalty. So that's what I obviously do. Scenery Objects is where it gets interesting.

Ground scenery shadows doesn't affect frames but it looks terrible, flickering, artifacts etc.

Scenery Complexity. This was a BIG one for frame rates. Each click on the slider cost 10fps. Moving this slider made a huge difference. I settled on very dense as dense looked a little sparse for me and extremely dense didn't seem to add much. However, I can immediately boost my fps by 10 just by turning this down to dense.

Autogen density. Surprisingly this didn't seem to be too expensive at all. Maybe 2-3 fps difference per slider position. I set this to very dense also.

Settings - Display - Weather
============================
This was a weird one. Setting cloud detail to detailed instead of simple actually GAINED 5fps. Very strange but I'll take it!


Settings - Display - Traffic
============================
THIS IS THE BIG ONE

CARS. Turn OFF Those stupid little cars absolutely kill the sim. Kill it. As an example I could make my frame rate go from 75fps to 15 fps just by changing the number of cars displayed by 50%. Turn those little blighters off and you'll be glad you did.

Aircraft labels. Most guides talk about this causing problems but I have zero frame rate penalty using them.

Airport vehicle density. This is quite a hit on frame rates. I set to Low, Medium cost 10fps.

Airline Traffic Density. This really impacts frame rates but not as much as cars. I have Ultimate Traffic and can set this to 50% airline, 100% general and the frame rates are great. This gives LOADS of planes and not much impact on frames unless you are flying over a major airport when it can go down to 20fps.

FSX.CFG
=======
Couple of VERY interesting things here. #1 hyperthreading doesn't help with frame rates at all. I have hyperthreading turned off on my gaming rig. Turning it on did nothing for frame rates

AffinityMask. This was a big one! For a quad-core setting to 15 (1111) means "use all cores" and 14 (1110) means "use three cores" leaving one free. On my system setting this to 14 was a big improvement over 15. Way less stuttering and the sim ran much smoother. Leaving one core available is highly recommended instead of using all four.

TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=800 This tweak limits the number of trees created on "dense" "very dense" etc. It raised by average frame rate by 7fps.

So remember, I'm NO expert on this just wanted to share my findings and what worked for me and what didn't on a modern machine running eyefinity. Hope this help someone new to get started.

My config: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14465749/fsx.CFG

I just mentioned this in another thread but worth repeating.

I found this tool worked brilliantly
http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html
but you have to follow the instructions exactly and there is a conf file that is not in the FSX folder which is the one that gets modified so you have to know where it is.

When used in conjunction with the frame limiter app it transformed FSX for me.

Yup, I did use that as my baseline setting. If you look at my fsx.cfg you'll see it was actually generated from that tool Thank you for the recommendation on that!

However, my frame rates went from about 15 (over atlanta downtown) using that tool to more than triple with the changes I listed here.

Adding this line in your terrain section should help a little as well, especially when using high autogen settings:

TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=800

It basically limit the number of trees without limiting the number of building. Made a good difference on my setup as with Very Dense/Dense, there was way too many tress displayed.

This fixed my issue.

This also made a godd difference on my end: Do not use the in-game anti-aliasing/anisotropic filtering settings, use your drivers instead, and try bilinear/16 bit mode in FSX. This gave me another 5-6 fps without changing ANYTHING to the image quality.

May or may not work well on your end, but worth a try.

You'll also notice that the aircraft/region you fly in will greatly influence the framerate as well.
On my Phenom X4 4.0ghz, I get an ultra smooth experience when flying a simple Aerosoft BeaverX in the rockies... but things are a bit difference when flying the Superbug in the KSEA area with ORBX isntalled. Not a slideshow, still very flyable, but a bit more stuttering.


Cheers!

Nice one iam73!!!! That made a HUGE difference. Thank you. Both of these entries boosted my fps by 7 in my test area. I am updating my original post to include these. Thanks again!!!

I have not turned my cars off to be honest. Yes they do affect frames but I like the effect they give when flying at around 1-2,000 feet. I leave them and the boats at around 15-20% which gives a realistic effect without hitting frames.

On another point I have the weather slider set to maximum but always use the 'download real weather updates' and I find this gives amazing sky and cloud effects without any performance issues. I have no desire to install any third party weather as I am really pleased with the FSX version. I love watching the sky and clouds slowly change as I fly and the cloud/sky models are very realistic.

This can be cranked up allllllllll the way to 6000, if one wants.

FSX Defaults is 4500 and it puts wayyyy too many trees on the grounds as far as I'm concerned, so although 6000 works, it must transform rural areas into amazon-like forest

Thanks for the advice MacClean. Some good tips, but I have to disagree with you about DX10. Checking DX10 yields far superior results FOR ME. My frame rate is DOUBLED with DX10. Literally. Same graphics settings under both DX9 and DX10 yields superior graphics detail and clarity and frame rates TWICE as high. Everything looks and plays better with DX10. And I select trilinear and anti-aliasing in-game. Everything is beautiful and smooth at 19 x 12 x 32. It's not even close between DX9 and DX10. Also, I no longer have any runway flickering (the only place I had any flickering at all) since I installed REX2 and REX Overdrive. Those programs must've done something to eliminate it. I didn't expect it, but that's been the result. And REX2/Overdrive are amazing enhancements! DX10 is the only way to go.

I wonder if DX10 only works for NVidia cards? I have an ATI 5850.

That's a good question. Some are reporting Il2 Cliffs of Dover seems to yield better results with ATI cards, although I don't own that sim, so I don't have first-hand experience. I do know I get significantly better frame rates with NASCAR Racing 2003 Season with Nvidia than with an equivalent ATI card. I know because I've tried it with both. The DX10 question at least with FSX might be a similar situation. Some games run noticeably with one technology vs. the other. It's too bad. I wish there was more consistency. But I find DX9 virtually unacceptable for FSX after trying it with DX10 preview checked. I can't go back. The difference is that significant.

Both ATI and Nvidia both support DX and OpenGL equally but somes older cards won't support the latest version of DX (ie 10 & 11) which is more hardware dependent. However, historically Nvidia have always been associated more with OpenGL and ATI more with DX although these days differences in performance is more down to how a games code suits a particular card and driver etc.

I just bought FSX Gold today. It runs pretty terrible unless i turn stuff down and then it doesnt look very good anymore.
I can play FS9 maxed so im really disappointed.
I guess its back to FS9...and a loss of 30 bucks.

My specs
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
6gb Ram
Intel Core i7 Q 740 @ 1.73GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 1gig

It's because your computer isn't a games computer. Things have moved on a lot since FS9.

Well, ill admit its not a purpose built gaming pc, it is a Sony Vaio laptop.
But its from last year and it runs most games ive played on it on high settings smoothly. So its definitely not lacking.
It just seems like to me that FSX needed more time of development to optimize it more. I mean for god sakes the game came out in 2006! Just rushed programming. IMO.
Any game from that era runs just fine on this. IL-2 Sturmovik 1946 for instance. Its rather graphically pretty in my opinion and that runs completely maxed with 60+ fps.

Sorry if it sounds like im venting. Im just rather frustrated.

Yep I can understand your frustration and Cliffs Of Dover is having the same problems FSX had when it came out.

FSX has had 2 patches and lots of tweaks guides and with the latest hardware it's now running well. But you do still need a fast pc to get it running properly.

I have an average pc with a Intel Quad core @ 2.8GHz, 4 GB RAM and an 8800GT and with the tweaks I now have it runing very nicely on a 1080P 32" tv. But I well remember when I first installed FSX it both looked at ran horribly.

But to be honest I don't think you will do any good with it on your laptop sadly.

I've used the online tweaker mentioned at the start of this topic and fair dinkum it has reduced load times by more than 66% on my i5/Win7.32/4g/Radeon 5770 system.

Use DX10 if you like 2xFSAA and poor anisotropic filtering.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm using DX9 with 8xMSAA / 16x Anisotropic filtering + ENB Series and it looks WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY better than the DX10 mode... which never even made it to beta stage by the way... was still alpha when FSX dev was totally dropped.

For what its worth, there's no FPS improvement to be seen with my ATI 6850.

"ENB Series" Tell me more!?

Sorry, but you are incorrect. I can turn up FSAA and anistropic as high as I want. No DX9 setting can match high graphics settings in DX10. That's just a fact. If you have an Nvidia card. If you have no FPS improvement with DX10 over DX9, then the fault lies with your ATI card. Get rid of it. Get Nvidia. My framerates literally DOUBLE with my Nvidia card. It's a simple test. Keep all graphics settings the same. Keep the same plane, airport, time of day. Change nothing. Just reboot from DX9 to DX10 and back again. 20 FPS in DX9 goes to 40 in DX10. Switch back to DX9 and frames are cut approximately in half again. Real easy and IRREFUTABLE test. DX10 also looks waaaaaaaaaaay better.


You're getting cheated. I've seen articles on the Net that show no significant advantage in frame rates with an ATI card. I think FSX is optimized for Nvidia. Some games are like that. Some games give are optimzed for ATI cards. FSX isn't one of them. Neither is NASCAR Racing 2003 Season. I tried it with comparable cards from ATI and Nvidia and couldn't believe the difference.

Be comforted in the knowledge that your ATI card has advantages in some other games.

Plainsman, what drivers are you using ?
We both run the same cards and my experiences of DX10 are a bit different to yours.

I don't get any noticeable FPS improvement in DX10 over DX9.
Also I've never been able to get FSAA to work athrough nHancer, only through FSX which is 2x.
And the biggie for me is that VSync doesn't work. Does VSync work for you ? I use TrackIR so I cant live without VSync.

Also there's the flickering runways & missing follow me arrows.

So the only things I gain with DX10 are the nicer water that I don't have set high enough to see to keep the FPS up and the cockpit shadows which are usually so basic or jaggie that I'd rather not have them.

My drivers start with 266, so I'm assuming it's the latest? I'm running at 1920 x 1200 x 32 rez, 16;10. I,too, had some runway flickering with DX10. Then I bought and installed REX2 and downloaded and installed the free REX Overdrive. REX lets you select your airport runway textures, clouds, skies, enhances lighting, and water. You can alter some or all of those things. YOu can select environment "themes." There is only a slight hit to FPS. The bonus discovery is that with REX2 the runway flickering is gone. I didn't expect that. I'll check, but as far as I know, I don't use VSync. Do you have your target frame rate in-game set to "unlimited?" or did you pick a number? I have mine set at unlimited.

I read somewhere that at low to moderate settings, you won't see a framerate increase between DX9 and DX10. But at high to very high settings you will. I snipped the following from a commment at another site:

"As Phil Taylor has rightfully pointed out in the comments section of the video, with bloom enabled and water on 2.X High people should see similar or higher framerates than with lower settings." I followed this advice. I have bloom enabled, water pushed all the way to the right as far as it will go. The funny thing is, on my PC, FSX with DX10 preview checked runs faster at 1920 x 1200 than it did at 1386 x 960. Go figure. I took this advice, turned it up and it's true. At that resolution, 2x AA is all you need to eliminate the last of the jaggies. I'm not a techie, so I don't mind taking advice from others.

Here's some forum posts from another site talking about the framerate issue. I"m not the only one: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=133237

HEre's a quote from someone on Avsim: "On my system, FSX is about 30% faster in DX10 than it is on DX9 keeping all other settings equal. I'm in the process of benchmarking this in a more sophisticated way than just comparing an FPS here and there. Speed (as recently demonstrated with the ATI Catalyst drivers) is largely a function of the driver more so than the raw hardware. True, hardware is limiting, but a bad driver can truly make rendering speed terrible."

But another poster on Avsim disagreed: "I think you need to qualify this statement a bit. Like maybe on "your system" or exactly what your settings are that are allowing a 30% performance increase.

Using my exact settings under DX10 Preview from DX9 on my system(with bloom off), I can have as much as a 50% performance decrease under DX10 depending on area (30FPS DX9 to 15FPS DX10) just not acceptable. The only bonus is that Light Bloom can be enabled under DX10 Preview and it seems to have little to no effect on FPS."

It seems some are getting no boost in framerates between DX9 and DX10, fewer are getting better frames in DX9, more are getting better frames in DX10. And the variation in the boost in frames if DX10 seems to range from 10% to as much as 100%. I'm getting the 100% increase, fortunately. And the runway flickering is gone (because of REX 2).

FSX has some many sliders for so many options, it's hard to say why I'm getting a 100% boost over DX9. Like I said, I'm not a techie. I haven't tweaked anything because I wouldn't know how. My sliders must be set (accidentally) at just the right positions.

It's a HDR mod addon originally made for GTA but one build works with FSX:

http://www.enb.fstube.org/node/2

Well, maybe NVIDIA renders the DX10 PREVIEW mode better, that would make sens as it was halfway developped and maybe ACE were developing on the NVIDIA platform, who knows... it wouldn't be the first mention of NVIDIA handling FSX better anyways

BUT no, you can't crank up FSAA/FSAF as high as you want in DX10 and that's also a fact. DX10 forces the in-game FSAA/FSAF and will override ANYTHING you set out of FSX... quoting Phil Taylor on this:

Btw guys, how can i change the initial FOV and make the virtual cockpit a default view? I always hate to be in an external view or anywhere lese but not the VC. And the FOV is always too small. The cockpit and view angly is always off.

Dont like Microsoft at all.

They took the apha fade out of FSX now we get loads of s****y pop ups no matter how good our gear is, then they stopped supporting FSX.

The miserable sods did the same sort of thing to the Links golf community by removing fog and career mode after initially having them in the game, then they also stopped supporting that as well.

They can whistle for any money from me.