Chris, My system is basically identical to yours (my i7 860 is the Lynnfield version of the Bloomfield i7 920 essentially). I seen nothing even close to the horrible performance you're talking about here. The only difference is the video card - yours is 3+ years old and mine 6 months (GTX 570), but even still I don't think that can explain this. You talk about getting 30FPS in the MD-11 as an example of good performance - that sounds very low to me as well for those specs. No one, I repeat NO ONE on our test team reported any performance problems like this. We'd have held the release if they had. (and god knows we held the release a billion times for literally anything that did come up) We didn't delay a year past our target date so that we could go "Oh well, the performance is horrible, let's release anyway now." It is just a fact that it's literally not possible to test on every single PC configuration that exists - especially when you consider the fact that software/drivers etc also play a role. If you want my honest opinion - I think you should redo your system clean. I think something's wrong and your performance on the whole is low. Have you done any hardware upgrades since you last installed Windows? I had terrible performance when I went from my old GTX 260 to my 570 - I thought the card was bad, incompatible with FSX etc - as a last ditch effort I reformatted the machine and it was like night and day.

And also - we DID do tests where we massively decreased the geometry, the mouse clickspots, the texture resolution etc to see if the performance got way better - it did not.

[searches for tiniest violin in the world] I have no problems at all. My rig is a bit older than yours and I'm getting 45fps in JFK. I have no issues. Good luck to you!

As you said:

I honestly can't understand how this product made it out of beta testing, with the supposed wide ranging beta team, ...... How is it possible that they didn't comment on the fact that flying this in any sort of scenery or bad weather grinds the show to a halt? ........ -Chris Virgilio

Your problem is a unreliable.Apparently you are in a small group of customers that observed the recommendations and still had this kind of problem. Sorry.

Nice explanation Ryan imo a new card will make a huge difference and also a nice clean install as you stated would be even better, I also had another idea I used the latest nvidia driver and it was crap had to go back to my older one might have a little something to do with it also.

these type posts are on par with the person you are accusing ...

Just going to put my 2 cents worth on this thread people talking about what they get in fps some say they getting heaps others saying not to good me iam in the middle range about 19 to 29 but i dont care u know why been flying this in orbox ybbn, ymml (10 to 19 on the grnd) fsdt dream team airports etc and been having no stutters at all plane flying nice and smooth so my point is if ur not having any stutters and the u are having smooth flight who cares about what ur fps are

There are a couple of the '*******' tweaks that I wouldn't touch with a barge pole.

Can you elaborate on which ones?

X-plane must have much better code but we all know the fsx code is lacking but we still luv this hobby and pay quite a bit to find the end of the rainbow, seems to be getting pretty close now wow just in time for msflight go figure, I think intel and nvidia should send christmas cards to them with money in them every year.

Boy your not kidding chasing that FS rainbow.I have gone from vapor phase change cooling cpu's, to buying complete cockpit panels from Flight Deck solutions, to finally building a complete commercial flightsim facility in Anaheim, CA http://www.flightdeck1.com, to finally burning out on it all.Now its round two :) Chris S

Dude, I just ripped this thing in to flytampas tampa rebooted (hands down the worst scenery in terms of frames) during REX thunderstorms, and never dropped below 30 frames.... Some thing is wrong with your system. I personally find the NGX performs better then the MD-11.

Can you elaborate on which ones?

Adjusting TextureMaxLoad to 9 based on your hardware.Only useful if you switch to unlimited frames and use the external limiter (great if you want a blurry mess in my experience) otherwise stick with the internal limiter and texture_bandwidth_multiplier. This tweak however will increase your FPS at the expense of image quality / the blurries. You must decide what is important to you here. SWAP_WAIT_TIMEOUT has been added to your configuration to prevent blurries.SmallPartRejectRadius have been added to your config for performance The output for those two do not take place (although the calculation is still performed) and are ignored by FSX SP1/2 These entries do nothing as per Phil Taylor (ex ACES) Adding MAX_ASYNC_BATCHING_JOBS for improved autogen batching performance.Does nothing post SP1/SP2 The shader 3 hack I would leave out for Nvidia cards too. Causes more problems than anything else. The ones I DO use: Affinity Mask works for some more than others. Certainly useful to try. The main benefit is possible reduction / elimination of micro stutters. 14 works for me.HIGHMEMFIX=1 is a fix. Use it.RejectThreshold=X is also a good one to try, but make sure you tune it to your system. Too low with demanding addons = FSX shutdown and the g3d.dll error. Please note these are only my opinions. ******* certainly deserves credit for all this investigation work and while some of the tweaks are brilliant, others fall into snake oil category.

I can run 737 perfect without any frames lost.... Carlitos Colon

Look, just because you cannot run an aircraft PERFECTLY doesn't mean you need to bash PMDG over it. If you took the time to read the minimum specs on the product page, you may have been able find out before giving PMDG your $70 for a wonderful airplane that they worked hard on. And if you knew a thing or two about computers, it really isn't your processor that counts...it is your graphics card and your amount of RAM and the difference between x86 and x64. It really aggravates me when a perfectly good product is made and people just have no amount of common decency or respect for the work put into it. If you don't like it, go make your own 737. Period. -Joseph

Im running a HD6870 and everything works great. Getting 20 - 30 fps in VC and 50 - 80 FPS on outside views.

Look, just because you cannot run an aircraft PERFECTLY doesn't mean you need to bash PMDG over it. If you took the time to read the minimum specs on the product page, you may have been able find out before giving PMDG your $70 for a wonderful airplane that they worked hard on. And if you knew a thing or two about computers, it really isn't your processor that counts...it is your graphics card and your amount of RAM and the difference between x86 and x64. It really aggravates me when a perfectly good product is made and people just have no amount of common decency or respect for the work put into it. If you don't like it, go make your own 737. Period. -Joseph

Fail...........FSX is 95% CPU bound, just like every other version of FS before it. CPU and overclocking the CPU will always be the number 1 perf improver. This aint Crysis.....