Well, I'm ready to take the plunge and go from 9 to 10. My system is fairly solid with 3 gig intel processor, 2 gig ram and an ATI X1600XT card.Wondering what basic sim or system tweaks I should plan on doing to get a good balance between frames and performance.Thanks all for your usual sound advice!

Bump.Has anyone compiled a list of the basic tweaks?Thanks!

Most of the tweaks that make an appreciable difference on a variety of machines are here: http://www.fox-fam.com/wordpress/?page_id=41Of course, your mileage may differ. Whatever you do, make backups of the various texture directories so that when something breaks, you can easily repair it.Jim Karn

Sure, and they are Matt Fox's page at the link posted by Jim above.Regarding M. Fox's page, the #1 tweak that helped my system the most was the replacement AutogenDescriptions.spb file.The modded default.xmls were #2.And the texture re-sizes really didn't have much effect on my rig.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2530 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8, WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian

Here's another compilation list, http://members.cox.net/spambait/FSXTweakGuide.pdfThomas[a href=http://www.flyingscool.com] http://www.flyingscool.com/images/Signature.jpg [/a]I like using VC's :-)N15802 KASH '73 Piper Cherokee Challenger 180

Thank you all very much for your help!!!

I'm looking for a thread where this would be most useful.I posted it already as an answer in another thread, but that one was rather "philosophical", so not really concerned tweaking FSX.I think which tweak works and which doesn't partly depends on the system specs and what elements in it are slowing the whole thing the most. So the configuration below is for weaker systems like mine, where memory and graphics card might be the main problem.I simply repost it here now, as I haven't found a better thread for it:After trying this and that, I found that many tweaks indeed were not as powerful as I thought.What I did was reverting all and then adding one after the other until I had about the performance I had before with all tweaks.My system:Pentium D 8301 GB RAMGeForce 6700 XL 128 MBNote: Low video memory might cause texture reduction tweaks to show more impact in this case.My results are:Tweaks and configuration applied to get a good balance:FSX.cfg tweaks:Fiber frame rate: Tried values from 0.66 to 0.10 - settled to between 0.20 and 0.25 for best results. Good framerates and not too many blurries. This setting seems to have the biggest impact on my system.Texture bandwith multiplier: Tried the standard of 40 up to 375. I'm now using 300 as it seems to speed loading up a bit.Autogen max trees: Had it rather low, but now I'm back to 2400.Autogen max buildings: now at 1800Pool Size: Something between 4000000 and 4500000 worked well for me. 5 million seemed to be to high for my system.Autogen directory tweaks:I had the AutogenDescriptions.spb tweak and the different default.xml file installed, but removing them didn't have a really noticable impact on framerates. So everything reverted to standard now.Texture reduction tweaks:Clouds have an impact on my system as soon as weather get's heavier.I applied the Cloud texture reduction batch conversion and it really helped.Also applied water and runway/taxiway batch files as visual impact is low and it might free some more video memory.FSX configuration:Target Framerate: >25Filtering: TrilinearAnti-Alias: OffGeneral Texture Resolution: Max. Leeds to VC and airplane textures at highest quality which is very noticable concerning the overall look.Light Bloom: Off. Drops my fps by about 10.Lense flare: On.Advanced Animations: On.High quality VC: On.Aircraft shadow on ground: On.Aircraft self-shadow: Off.Landing lights illumination: On.LOD radius: Max.Mesh Resolution: 19 or 38m. Don't know what's the maximum with stock terrain.Mesh Detail: 52 or 56. Sometimes it almost seemed as if values above 50 even improved performance instead of reducing it.Texture Resolution: 1mWater Detail: Low 2.xLand Detail Structure: On.Scenery Complexity: Very Dense (important for displaying of jetways)Autogen Density: NormalGround Scenery Shadows: Off.Special Effects Detail: Medium.Cloud Draw Distance: Minimum.Cloud Detail: Detailed.Cloud Density: One notch from minimum. Don't know the designation.Weather Change Rate: - see Cloud Density -AI airliners: 10%AI general aviations: 5%Airport Vehicle Density: Medium.AI vehicles: 15%AI Ferries/Ships: 15%Leisure boats: 5%System tweaks:After starting FSX, I set the process priority to highest (not real-time).I stopped as many processes as safely possible to get way above 700MB free physical memory.I set Windows style to classic. No wallpaper, no modern style windows.Anti-Alias driver settings: 2x (2xQ blurs textures, 4x costs too much performance)AF: Either off or 2x. (the 6700 XL is rather an overclocked 6600 and doesn't pack too much)These are my settings. There might be one or the other error, as I wrote this without having the opportunity to look at the settings again, but this is how I remember them.I think those setting could be called medium concerning what some people seem to have proposed on this forum. To my own surprise, this runs rather well. Except for some moments when things have to be loaded, it never falls into single digits. Most times it's above 15 fps, even at bigger airports (don't mention KSEA, that's a different story). Bush flying get's me to the framerate limiter, while autogen density looks nice.My conclusion is either some system require custom tailored tweaks, because some tweaks depend on what's the main problem: Machine speed, driver problems or just low memory.If a future patch allows full use of multiple core systems, then my system could make another jump forward, as the Pentium D is not fully used now. So things can only get better... not worse.

I doubt you will need to tweak FSX with a system like that. I get a solid 20-30+ fps outside of major cities like LA using the default settings MS set up for my system (Intel P4 3.6GHz sys w/2 gigs of SDRAM, and X800XT video card). I did turn off autogen as the ACES Team had it set at medium. I have not used any suggested tweaks and have no plans to do so. Around cities, my fps fall occasionally as low as 7 fps but FSX handles low frames well so not a major problem for me. I will be upgrading my system in Jan or Feb after VISTA, DX10, and DX10 compatible cards are released.Best regards,Jim

Thanks for the tip!. I'll know for sure in a couple of weeks.Regards,