No, OrbX is not 100% accurate. It's simply 'more accurate' and more aesthetically pleasing than the default terrain and landclass. Many custom objects are added -- I can personally attest that landmark dams and windfarms were added to the area around my city in NA: Central Rocky Mountains, and that Great Falls International Airport got some (incorrect) fighter jets to represent the Air National Guard base. The roads, water bodies, landclass, etc. are usually better than with UTX (although sometimes UTX wins) but in general are far better than the default terrain. You still have glitches caused by overlaying several layers of data, however, like roads going into water bodies and crossing over rooftops.

You might find this thread interesting to read.

As for the traffic, have you turned it down in the settings menu? Try running it at 10-15%, which I think is what ORBX FTX's manuals recommend. This isn't gridlock simulator, mind you.

I would really like to have cars on the roads, planes flying and taking off and stuff going on at the airport but turning it on even to the lowest settings causes a huge drop in framerate.

I'm running a core i5 760 @3.4ghz and GTX680 with 8gb ram.

EDIT: I have tried setting only airliner density to 10% and even that causes the game to drop below 30fps or airport vehicle density to minimum and that also causes a big framerate drop.

Also on an unrelated note I can't get the game to give me a cold+dark start on every mission. I tried going into a mission, shutting off the engine and then saving it as the default mission but it still starts the mission with the engine running every time. Is there a mod or something I can download to fix this so every plane will start shut off?

Where is your 'target framerate' slider set? Limit them -- read this.

I had it locked at 60.

redpiano, also try Bojote's tweaking tool, along with the Nvidia Inspector settings that are outlined over at the Avisim.com forums. For most systems, these tweaks (and they are relatively simple to implement) produce outstanding results.

FSX, with addons, is really an amazing piece of software, IMHO.

I did that tweak last night yes.

Here is a screenshot of my scenery settings and what the game looks like.




My framerate without traffic and these settings is around 20 and traffic doesn't seem to change it as much as I thought so something else is going on.

I really don't want to lower the settings more than this because the game quickly gets ugly when you do. I tried changing my framerate lock, it didn't have any real effect on smoothness or framerate whether I put it to 20, 30, 60 or even 40.

Game is running nice and smooth and looks excellent in forest areas, must just be that I was flying in seattle that the frames got so bad.

By the time you figure out that you've invested so much time in FSX making it look nice and run reliably, you'll *want* to keep flying it just to get a solid return on your original investment. Then the next scenery or super detailed aircraft is released that absolutely tickles your funny bone and the whole process starts over.

A note on the Orbx stuff: after each "piece of the puzzle" you purchase (or obtain if a free-ware airport or city scenery <like Portland>) and install, please ensure you re-install the Orbx "Libraries" found as a free download on their support page: http://fullterrain.com/support.html

I like the coverage area of both the Northern Cali and Southern Rocky Mountains areas... Can't wait to add them!

Redpiano, you seem to have a decent CPU and a GTX 680 so I think you may really benefit by using the recent Nvidia driver adaptive vsync settings discovered by the folks at AVSIM combined with a locking the framerate at 30:

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/369500-adaptive-vsync-30fps-new-levels-of-smoothness-in-fs9x/

Other FSX.CFG tweaks here:
http://forum.avsim.net/topic/370594-read-before-posting-software-hardware-guide-for-fsx/

I used the venotubu and other hand FSX tweaks for years (which worked pretty well), but recently went with a fresh FSX.CFG tweaked using just the stuff in those two links with framerate capped at 30 FPS and my FSX has never been so smooth and stutter free.

IMHO you should try at least the adaptive vsync tweak if nothing else, it has really changed FSX for many of us, the only thing I am not sure is if it benefits systems with clockspeed below 4Ghz which I think yours is. Worth a try though.

I run ORBX PNW on a pretty modest system.

The two things that made the biggest difference for me were:

1) Running my .cfg file through the tweaking tool linked above.
2) Using antilag as an external FPS limiter and setting FPS to unlimited in FSX. I saw maybe a 25% increase in FPS (and when you're in the 15-20 fps range a lot of the time that's huge). Not sure that trick works (I think it has something to do with not making FSX worry about limiting frames resulting in higher output from FSX), but it works.