First time posting here. Decades of experience with FSX (although I took a break and tried hard to love MSFS2020...too many things regressed instead of progressed there...) Back to FSX!
Just bought ORBX sceneries (Base Pack, PNW, and a couple of airports) after trying lots of stuff to make FSX more real and enjoyable. I read LOTS of posts on LOTS of forums. (I'll be posting this on AVSIM as well). I bought Ultimate Terrain X. I bought Megacenery Arizona and California. I downloaded free airport addons. It just wasn't doing it for me. Megascenery added a little realism if I was flying a really high, otherwise it was just lifeless. I wanted better visuals, but something with buildings, trees, etc. A living world! I also tried AI Traffic addons. The only one that worked smoothly and reliably with FSX (Steam Version) was Traffic Global. It took a bit of following instructions in the manual (in other words not super intuitive but easily setup). THAT program really made the airports and sky come alive. Highly recommended!!
But I still wanted a better visual environment. So I finally bit the bullet and spent the bucks on ORBX. That gave me everything I wanted. Great scenery, airports, life animation, etc. But when I flew in or out of any mildly busy airport, my FPS wer so low it was almost impossible to enjowy- and landing...forget it! I was really bummed. After all, FSX is decades old and I have a modern computer. FSX ran great before addons. Why couldn't it still run great?
I searched forums and found some FSX.cfg tweaks and also recommendations for lowering FSX settings for AI Traffic, ground vehicles, etc. Between the cfg changes and the lowered settings, which lost so little in realism that it wasn't at all detracting, I ended up with such better FPS that I can't believe the difference. I was starting to think that ORBX just was going to kill my FPS in spite of how great it made the FSX world look.
So, if anyone using FSX experiiences these performance issues, don't give up. With a few settings and easy text additions to the cfg file, you can have a very smooth running, incrediby improved visual world.
What I did:
FSX Settings-
GRAPHICS
Target Frame Rate- Unlimited
Filtering- Trilinear
Anti-Aliasing- unchecked
Bloom and Lens effects- unchecked
AIRCRAFT
Aircraft Shadows- unchecked
SCENERY
Level of Detail Raius- Large
Mesh Resolution- 38m
Tecture Resolution- 60cm
Scenery complexity and Autogen density- Dense
TRAFFIC
Airline density and General aviation density- 46%
Airport vehicle density- Low
Road Vehicles- 12%
FSX.cfg file (located in Users/Your Name/AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/FSX (you may have to select Hidden Folders setting to see AppData...not sure..)
Add this at the top of the file:
[BUFFERPOOLS]
PoolSize=0
Add this underneath "[GRAPHICS]"
HIGHMEMFIX=1
Add this under "[Display]"
SmallPartRejectRadius=4
I do not know WHY these things work but after trying LOTS of tweaks this one made a HUGE difference in my FPS. ORBX airports like LAX or SEA, which had me getting 10-12 FPS now give me 23-35 FPS !
IMPORTANT!!! Always ackup your cfg file just in case, on your system, this causes issues.
Happy Flying Everyone!
Pete