magnetite

Same for any other forum.

According to the main rendering FAQ from LM, if you're not getting good performance in P3D, you should upgrade your GPU instead of your CPU.

I'd upgrade your GPU for better autogen performance. If your plane disappears or takes a little bit to appear in spot view, a better GPU will help alleviate this problem. Specifically one with more shader processors and texture mapping units on the card.

Why compare stock for stock? Because you want an even playing field. Addons only drag performance down further and leave uneven results. I thought Lockheed Martin could do whatever they wanted when it came to the source code of ESP? Or can they not change the core of it? Games made in the mid-2000s or even modern games like Overwatch don't render the visible horizon of Earth. Roughly 120 square kilometers or so. They render a small little map about the size of a city block. Some might be bigger like GTA V or Skyrim, but they still aren't as big as FSX's rendering distance. Bigger render distance and number of things to render means more performance hit, not less. FSX is typically not seen as a game though, so it can't be compared to a game. It's a 3D simulation platform. Maybe it's not the code, but rather simulating the planet in a complex aircraft is just naturally heavy on computation and graphics. Like video encoding. Despite all the advances with hardware and software in that area, it still runs like a tank. The newest video compression technology, H265, actually runs roughly 2.5 times slower than H264 developed roughly 13 years ago.

When you compare the performance of FSX to a different game, you should do a GTA V stock install to a FSX stock install. Not a GTA V without addons to FSX with addons.

FSX can easily get 60+ FPS without add-ons on today's computers.

FSX does use HDR lighting in DX10. It's not tweakable from the menu like the P3D version is. You have to edit the shader files.

If it's not broken don't fix it.

FSX doesn't use all available resources, because it constantly has to be calculating and loading up huge amounts of scenery even while you fly. Unlike a game which loads everything it needs at the loading screen, in a small enclosed map, it doesn't really load anything or do complex calculations to simulate the visible portion of the planet. It seems you have your autogen settings fairly high. Phil Taylor from ACES said that autogen performance is dictated by the PCIe bus and your GPU having sufficient texture bandwidth. Cards with more shaders and TMUs would help.

Delete your FSX config file, and let FSX rebuild it to pick up the new card. Delete your shader cache folders and let FSX rebuild those as well. The shader folders are located under C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Local\Microsoft\FSX\

It's back up now.

Higher end cards will give you extra smoothness too. Especially with autogen.

If you want to go the cheap route, get a better GPU. Such as the GTX 970. Should be a nice upgrade without breaking your wallet. AMD's GPUs don't work well with FSX. Anisotropic filtering should help provide clearer looking textures, if you haven't turned it on already in the options.

FSX can't really be compared to a game though. It's a completely different animal. It's not some hand-tuned level (like most of those games) with a small viewing distance. It's a huge open world with a 120 km+ viewing distance. So the amount of things that need to be rendered and loaded at any one time is a lot more than those games.

Texture loading times, yes. Skylake runs on PCIe 3.0 (as well as your GPU), while Sandy Bridge runs on PCIe 2.0. So the textures will load into VRAM faster, resulting in less gray textures in VC (or other places). Your GPU will spend less time waiting for things and more time rendering.