Could this be one of the reasons for improved FS2004 performance?

From what I have read over the last month or so, FS2004 performs at least as well as FS2002 (in the case where the two sims are compared at the equivalent settings - which of course means in the case of FS2004 some niceties need to be turned off or sliders moved further left).I'm just wondering if a major reason for this might be that the actual scenery objects have been significantly overhauled and / or replaced? I was just thinking about this when I was reading Geofa's response to the question about bridges. If we look at FS2002, a lot of the scenery was a mish-mash of new Gmax objects and autogen objects, but also, importantly, pretty poor quality "legacy" objects that we typically saw in FS2000 and even FS98. It seems with FS2004, however, that just about all that inefficient legacy scenery has all but disappeared and has now been replaced by full GMax objects everywhere or expanded autogen. In FS2002, even objects like control towers, radars, beacons, some bridges, etc seemed to be the old style objects but in FS2004 they seem to be all-new.