Very nice. Now this is the way to get to the bottom of things!Couple of questions/comments:- Try a higher AA and AF. On my Nvidia card I found 8xS to be better than 4x or 2x. Huh? But others have had it too.- The TERRAIN Trees etc settings I've discovered only make a difference in the wilderness where it's all trees. Maybe check that?- How about the clouds? Draw Distance? Quality? Few, many, overcast, building storms, fair weather? I'd be interested to know the damage behind different cloud scenarios.Have a good one.

Scott, you really should consider dropping your water down to 2XLow. The only thing you'll lose is the cloud reflections, and the performance boost is significant. On my system, which is a E6850 @3.0Ghz 4GB 800Mhz ram. and a 9800GTX card with Water at 2Xmid, my FSMark = 19, but with water set to 2XLow it is 24. That is with my scenery settings at Extremely dense, Autogen at Dense, Mesh 10m Complex at 75% and 100% WOAI traffic. (A rather large collection with most of the available US and Europe's Major and regional airlines, Asian main carriers, and some Africa and South American carriers. You didn't mention did you have traffic with your tests? If not your results seem kind of low with the speed of your system. I get 23 without traffic (Water 2XMid). I do use UTUSA/GEX, as well as REX.

Thanks for the feedback. I took your advice on the water setting. Here are my numbers using FSMark:Max 2x - 14.41 FPSHigh 2x - 15.97 FPSMid 2x - 16.80 FPSLow 2x - 21.52 FPSThat is quite a huge savings to go down to Low 2x. I think I will keep that. Regarding my traffic settings, they are set to Ultra High and I use MyTraffic. I did another quick experiment and turned all traffic off with Low 2x. My number using FSMark is:Low 2x with no traffic (instead of Ultra High) - 26.91 FPSI like traffic though so I will keep at Ultra High.Thanks,Scott

In case anyone is interested, here is what is done at each water setting from Phil Taylor (I apologize if this is old info):1.x has no reflections: The lowest 1.x level does the basic shader. The mid 1.x level adds an animated detail texture. The highest 1.x level adds some specular effects2.x adds a 2nd pass to get reflections and this can be a killer: 2.low reflects only the clouds and has a little more complicated shader

Thanks for the feedback. I took your advice on the water setting. Here are my numbers using FSMark:Max 2x - 14.41 FPSHigh 2x - 15.97 FPSMid 2x - 16.80 FPSLow 2x - 21.52 FPSThat is quite a huge savings to go down to Low 2x. I think I will keep that. Regarding my traffic settings, they are set to Ultra High and I use MyTraffic. I did another quick experiment and turned all traffic off with Low 2x. My number using FSMark is:Low 2x with no traffic (instead of Ultra High) - 26.91 FPSI like traffic though so I will keep at Ultra High.Thanks,Scott

Also check that ground shadows are off, that is really a significant hit. Aircraft shadows are ok, provided it doesn't interfere with your AI. (FS9 models disappear with Ground Shadows on. I getLow 2x with no traffic - 26 - Ground Shadows offLow 2x with no traffic - 23 - Ground Shadows on.

This is an interesting thread. Another feature to try out is the LOD_RADIUS setting in the fsx.cfg file. The default is set to 4.5, but by increasing it up to 8.5, you can extend the clearness of the horizon. Of course, the higher the setting, the more the frame rate is impacted.This scenery review (Madeira X Avsim review) has a good comparison as to what LOD_RADIUS does. You can see the four different settings near the very bottom of the review.I have my LOD_RADIUS set to 7.5 and I haven't detected any sort of fps loss that I can tell. Note that this setting always goes back to the default 4.5 every time you change your scenery settings within FSX. So you must manually change this setting if you change your scenery settings in FSX.

Thanks for the LOD_RADIUS tip. Here are my FSMark numbers:4.5 - 22.11 FPS (default)6.0 - 21.437.5 - 19.599.0 - 19.3412.0 - 18.98For me I took a FPS hit going from 4.5-7.5 so I think I will keep it at 6.0. It did look better though as objects and textures are drawn out further. Then from 7.5 to 12.0, I didn't see a big frame rate drop but the load time of the flight was much, much longer. I am sure my memory usage was way up as well. It looks fantastic though to see so much autogen.Scott