After purchasing several add ons like AirHauler and FTX Global, I have renewed interest in FS.  But as you can see my hardware is somewhat old (I'm getting stutters, flashing textures, shimmering, have to run  low AA settings etc..).  I've been given the go ahead to build a new system, but how much faster is PCI-E 3.0 over 1.0? 

 

Is there newer technology coming that will push the envelope (and prices lower) that I should wait for?

Your old hardware is PCIe 2.0 thou. 16 lanes PCIe 1.0 (or 8 lanes PCIe 2.0) will seriously hamper your FPS over heavy autogen if you run anything that isn't locked @ 30 FPS or lower.

At the moment I can't think of anything it the pipeline launching in the near future that will give FSX a serious boost compared to what we have today. That you have to keep your AA settings down isn't surprising with a 560ti thou. It was a good bang for the buck card, but as it didn't cost that much, it's performance still wasn't that great if you want to crank up the AA.

I've been given the go ahead to build a new system, but how much faster is PCI-E 3.0 over 1.0? 

 

I believe bandwidth for each iteration of PCI-e is 2x the prior iteration.  So for your question I am guessing it would be 2x X 2x = 4x, or PCI-e 3.0 has 4x the bandwidth of PCI-e 1.  The real question, because we're talking about bandwidth, is what is the maximum bandwidth demanded by maximally tricked out FSX.  I believe some, Word Not Allowed maybe, have confirmed PCI-e 3.0 over 2.0 isn't meaningful, but surely meaningful over PCI-e1.0

Thanks, I see wikipedia has a lot of gorey details on it as well.

FSX actually benefits somewhat from more PCI-E bandwidth, so you definitely want at least 16 lanes of PCI-E 2.0 Unlike modern games, optimized for modern hardware, FSX keeps shuffling data back and fourth between the CPU/RAM and GPU/Video memory over the PCI-E interface. This made sense in 2006 with 256MB video cards, but modern 3D engines like to keep as much data as possible in video memory since modern video cards have at least 1.5GB of RAM.

 

I'm surprised the sim runs so poorly on your system. My old system was a Phenom II @ 3.6 GHz and a GTX 460. Apart from OrbX airports, there were never any serious issues running FSX. If you get flashing textures and shimmering, it sounds like something is wrong with the system.