Totally true, Ben: I normally run Inspector locking frames at 30, with FSX locking set to 24, and find this gives me the overall smoothness regardless of weather, traffic or aircraft.

Now that is interesting to hear, as I too lock both my inspector and FSX frames - 35/33 for me.I thought it must have been placebo, but I did feel that fixing the frames in both seemed to offer a smoother experience over locking just one or the other!

Now I know my GPU could use an upgrade. I'm working on that. But it shouldn't be *that* bad, I don't think.

No it's not.If I had already owned a 460 when I bult this new PC I would not have upgraded to a 580, at least not for FSX. But since I only had an 8800GTS I went ahead and upgraded. And even so, I'm certainly NOT seeing a $460 performance gain.

Do this, do that, remove this, add that... can't do any testing like that!! You'll never know where you are really.I suggest you run the FSXMark11 with the setting in the PDF (check hardware forums), and then compare in the online list. I can see there are some comparable machines in there, so you should get quite a conclusive comparison if your machine is running on par with others.Then start doing this or that... (=tweaking).

You're just expecting too much, with that weather depiction flying around Seattle!This is FSX remember, poorly optimized, not interested in Multi-Cores, and CPU bound.You say this :-

I still play ArmA II and BF3 flawlessly...

..but that has absolutely zero bearing on how FSX will run; those games are built completely differently.I think what you are getting is about right, for;-- a weather setting of that nature,- in and around Seattle,- with a GTX 460,Overclock and / or pick up a cheap GTX 480, lower your weather a little, and move from Seattle to an alternative area, and you could have 70 FPS. ;)

I'm sorry but turning off printer spooler etc will absolutely have no effect at all LMAO. It's not 1995.Anyway I would expect a lot more FPS from that system, especially in the cessna. Sounds like something is wrong

I get a smooth as glass 45 to 60 FPS running unlimited frame lock in the default Cessna with storm weather over Seattle6 core 980x @ 4.28GHz and a GTX 480 using all of Nick Needhams Windows and FSX advice and without any bufferpools or other tweaks

I get a smooth as glass 45 to 60 FPS running unlimited frame lock in the default Cessna with storm weather over Seattle6 core 980x @ 4.28GHz and a GTX 480 using all of Nick Needhams Windows and FSX advice and without any bufferpools or other tweaks

and I'm sure you're in the teens if you fly at night, with poor weather, using a complex jet. FPS are deceiving. I'm 5 fps away from having the perfect sim experience. :LMAO:

and I'm sure you're in the teens if you fly at night, with poor weather, using a complex jet. FPS are deceiving. I'm 5 fps away from having the perfect sim experience. :LMAO:

You would be incorrect.In the Flight1 Mustang VC (which I am sure you can agree is one of the hardest hitting VC's on the market) under the same conditions I see between 23 and 36 (sometimes higher) fluid FPS running unlimited frame lock, and that would include UT traffic running 80% AL and GAI think its amazing how many people think they have to run 4.7GHz to see excellent FSX results

35fps in a stock ( well almost ) is poor for the hardware, if you are using settings through nvidia inspector then remove them as you dont have the right card to push the AF and AA settings, also dont use HD textures as that can have a negative effect on your sims performance and dont use a LOD of more than 5.5 atm.While your card might have good gpu power it does not have enough memory on it to push the settings to much and to much AA/AF and LOD radius with to high AA settings will eat up all your gfx memory in a blink of an eye and that will force your fps down to almost nothing as the card gets busy clearing its memory and loading more in to itMy 470 has just died on me but that had 1.2gig of ram and pushing the settings always caused fps issues as i ran out of usable gfx memory.I would almost go as far as saying.. clear the changes you made in Nvidia inspector and back up your fsx.cfg and remove it.. let the sim build a new one and just tweak the settings inside the sim for now before you try to push for better quality, and remember dont use a high water quality setting.. try 2xmid before you push for quality.and follow what Word Not Allowed has said as it will help you.If you do upgrade your gfx card buy one with 2gig of memory on it as that will better allow you to run HD textures with decent AA and AF settings.

You need to get rid of the bufferpool.Use: UsePools=0Have nothing else in the entry.That will fix it. It did for me. You have the system to use that tweak stabily. I literally get 10-15 more FPS with that tweak and can fly in the NGX just about everywhere, including Orbx Seattle (which is hell on any system).Also, another thing I did when I upgraded was I had to completely delete my fsx.cfg. I let it rebuild. Then I added the tweaks (really just affinitymask, highmem tweak, and usepools =0...nothing else really matters IMO).My 2500k ran like a dog until I deleted the old fsx.cfg and rebuilt it with the new hardware. I don't know technically why, but it did.

Two steps you might have forgotten:Make sure FSX FPS is on UnlimitedIn your fsx.CFG, at this under the [bUFFERPOOLS] entry:PoolSize=0. This gives great FPS, although you may occasionally get some black arfifacts in spotview.If that doesn't work, a component might be faulty.

What about starting over, save your current fsx.cfg then delete current one, start FSX let is build you one. Then add highmemfix=1 option....Also sometimes FSX runs poorly with lower settings. For fun set everything on max except water to 2.x low and cloud vis to 60mi.

Hey guys, I redid a lot of things. Even my entire OS. Reinstalled everything....and I've really gotten somewhere this time.That's 75.4 FPS looking north in Seattle *BEFORE* all tweaks and optimizations.Now I know it's not in stormy weather, so it's not really a controlled test. But the picture taken on the first page of the thread was in south Seattle, looking towards the south. For anyone who's unaware of the area, looking north in Seattle is harder on a system than looking south, because you're looking at several complex airports (KSEA and KBFI) as well as downtown Seattle itself with tons of building autogen, 2 stadiums, and many tall buildings.I'm hoping to be able to get close to 80 FPS after doing a defrag and tweaking my FSX.CFG a bit. That is going to be *way* better than 34 FPS when switching over to the NGX.I'll post a final shot after all tweaks are done. Hopefully I'm able to get up there at 80. I think it just all comes down to luck haha.Also I installed a different version of Intel's Management Engine, messed with Nvidia Inspector a bit, and my PC is just all around cleaner..and seems to be healthier.

Looks good! But what in the God's name is the Intel Management Engine? Why do you need it? I've always said, less is more. I say: chipset, network, gpu, sound, sata. What else does one need? Anything else is just clogging the system.

Hey Word Not Allowed, from what I know the IME driver is a BIOS extension driver.Without it, the PCI Simple Communications Controller won't be read properly in the device manager...and Windows Update will install a generic version of the driver.It's not a driver that's necessary on all chipsets though.