I am not sure if anyone has the same settings as I do but I am running at almost ALL my sliders maxxed. I have a 980X (oc to 4.2), evga 480OC, 6 gb dominator 1600 tri channel, asus rampage III mobo and with the pmdg J41, UTX, FEX, GEX, ASE, dreamteam KORD and while in KORD I still dont get 30 fps. BUT it IS nice and fluid. I get around 22-25 fps which seems to be like FS9's 40 FPS

Fluid is NOT the same thing as not stuttery. As Ryan already said, there is a huge visual difference between 25 and 40fps, and one can definitely see it. And comparing FS9 and FSX is totally irrelevant. I'm talking here about FPS in FSX and nothing else.

Fluid is not the same as stuttering? They are very tied together. Basically the same. If it isn't fluid it IS stuttering.

Not how I see it. Stuttering is occasional pausing of the sim, very often or seldom, sometimes long and sometimes short, usually caused by the wrong setting or HDD which can't keep up, causing pauses. Fluidity is solely dependable on frames per second. More you have, more fluid it will feel. And the more you ask from the system which the system can't take, the more it will stutter. But still it must not be reflected in FPS...Of course, they are somewhat connected, meaning it will feel more fluid, if you have no stutters, or vice versa, but they are not tied together, they both work at each owns cause. To ruin our simming experience :(

---------------------- Fluidity is solely dependable on frames per second. More you have, more fluid it will feel. And the more you ask from the system which the system can't take, the more it will stutter.----------------------

Word Not Allowed- No doubt- frames per second is important- generally speaking, the more, the better. But the real question is- At what frame rate does your eye/brain combo no longer detect individual frames? There are display circumstances where relatively low frame rates can fool the eye into seeing apparent smoothness.In the situation of multiple monitors displaying multiple views LFwd,Fwd,RFwd (AND where the views have been closely integrated to compensate for the bezels separations)- a low frame rate can appear very smooth.I setup my triple displays with a single monitor/view showing 30-50 FPS (by adjusting FS9 settings).When triple views are activated, FPS drops to about half or 15-25.But smoothness or fluidity remains same as with the single monitor/view. I have tested this smoothness many times by suddenly killing the outer views while in flight & I can detect no change in smoothness whether frame rate shows 18 or suddenly jumps to 36!The reason seems to be that 2/3 of the whole image is always frozen (an INFINITELY HIGH frame rate!), while 1/3 is updating. (after all, there IS only ONE CPU available to do the computation!). As long as FPS remains above the optical refresh threshold of 14-16, the whole triple view (3072x768) picture seems as smooth as a single view (1024x768) image at twice the frame rate.So displayed Frame Rate doesn't tell the whole story.Alex Reid