I made the change shown above. However, when flying through clouds now, they just instantly disappear there is no gradual change anymore. Am I the only one seeing this?.

I've made several flights and never experienced that... are you using ASE by any chance?

A quick couple of flight results, *******: Flying at PNW I experienced swings down to 12 on startup, with stuttering and lower frames, which I had locked at 24. With it unlocked there were large swings with the resultant hesitation every three seconds or so. I was using ASE, and didn't try it with plain heavy FSX clouds. I copied back the original, .fx, killed the Shader folder and re-flew the flights with no problems., so this one didn't work for me. I will try without ASE later.

I upped my tbm setting from 40 to 80, and lowered the autogen to normal. now I can fly in PNW or anywhere with smooth fps