After a couple weeks of testing, I am now quite satisfied by my configuration. Visuals are good (very good actually), everything is smooth, I get around 25 - 36 fps almost everywhere (limited at 36)

 

My hardware:

 

I7 2600K @ 4.5 GHz

GTX 770 4GB DDR5 VRAM

16 GB RAM 1600

P3D2 installed on an SSD.

 

Software:

Win7 64 bit ultimate on an SSD

P3D2 on another SSD with FTX Global and FlyTampa St Marteen complete

RealAir Duke and A2A 172 Trainer

 

ok, here is what worked for me:

 

- installing P3D2 on an SSD

- turning on AERO

- limiting at 36 instead of 30 fps, with VSync and triple buffering enabled

- patching FTXG to version 1.2

- limiting the autogen (both trees and buildings) to dense

- FXAA off

- MSAA 8 samples
- Anisotropic 16x

- texture resolution 4096x4096

- tessellation: enabled

- water detail ULTRA with bathymetry enabled, reflections: all ON except clouds and sim objects

- All othe settings on this page: full right

- Lighting: uncheck "landing lights illuminate ground", other two checked

- Shadow Quality High, Internal and External on cast end receive, Terrain on receive

- Weather on default

- Aviation traffic around 10%, Airport traffic Minimum

- Land and sea traffic around 45%

- NVIDIA inspector: Antialiasing 16xS

 

And last but not least: I REDUCED the access speed to my RAM memory to the nominal 1600 that it is supposed to be (I don't remember why I had increased it in the first place tbh) and I slightly increased the voltage of my CPU.

 

As I said: this works very well for me, I hope it will be the same for you, at least for those with a rig like mine, quite a reasonable build today.

 

Of course, I tried to get a crash or an OOM by repeating the same flights that gave me problems before. I flew about 6 hours on the 172: not a single issue.

 

For some reason, I have a feeling that taking back the autogen sliders and reducing the RAM speed solved a lot of problems.

 

Enjoy ...

Great post. I'll have to go through your list. I have the same  GTX770, that I just upgraded from a GTX570. The better gpu makes a world of difference. One this is that I'm running an older i7 950 @ 3.8 GHZ. Overall I'm happy with my performance, but I'm not sure if my older cpu is a bottleneck.

Unless you do underwater development you can disable Bathymetry as it provides no visual difference from above and chips away at performance. 

Uhm.... I'm not sure about bathymetry ... And it doesn't tax my system, which means, I think, that my bottleneck is in the CPU.

I have to add that I also had some smoothness benefit from the 

 

AffinityMask = 14

 

setting in the cfg file.