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So I am playing around in Prepar3D 2.4 (still haven't jumped to 2.5). I bought a new GTX 980 and installed it. I wiped the shader directory out and blew away the Prepar3D.cfg file and let it build a new one. My settings are pretty high I will admit but I did this on purpose because I wanted to watch the performance on my monitoring software. My test bed was FSDT's KLAS sitting at gate C18 with 40% AI traffic. 2048 x 2048 textures. 4x MSAA. 8x Ani. All sliders maxed on the graphics except for the mesh resolution. It's one to the left. Autogen trees/buildings are normal and scenery complexity is Extreme. Lighting is full on with cloud shadows and object casting. Terrain casting is still way to much punishment so I don't use it. I had ASUS Tweak open and monitoring the GPU and I had Progress Lasso open monitoring my 12 cores. Here is where the tail chasing starts. Maybe a tech guru can explain it all to me. My new GPU will NOT go beyond 40% usage. It doesn't matter if I max out everything or turn everything off. P3D refuses to use more than about 40% of the power the card is capable. Every single other game I run always pegs the card at 100% with incredible results. I am stupid impressed by this card's performance in other games such as ARMA 3 and Skyrim. Those aren't simulations though, at least not as detail. I know this. The CPU is banging away on the 4 cores I assigned to P3D. I have 0-11 cores. I use core 5, 7, 9 and 11 for P3D. All other cores run other processes and add-ons for P3D. Core 5 is around 80% most of the time with 7, 9 and 11 bounce around between 20-40%. Total processor usage is 25-35%. Does P3D *EVER* use 100% of the GPU with anyone's setup? Even in a thunderstorm with cloud detail to MAX, I still don't get past 50% usage on the card. Something is obviously bottlenecking things right? I can't figure out what that could be. The CPU? The GPU? The RAM? The Front Side bus of the motherboard? Evil gnomes? I have an i7 3930k @ 4.4ghz with GTX 980 OC 4gig card. 32 gigs of G.Skill 1866mhz RAM is up on a X79 Sabertooth motherboard. My sim runs on a Raptor 10k RPM drive and is the only thing on it. My frame rate doesn't even really move that much between low and high settings. The Default F22 runs like crazy at around 60-80 FPS in the VC. The entire sim is smooth which is what you want, more so than FPS but it still bothers me to get into a heavy hitting airliner like an Aerosoft A320 or the new PMDG 777 and watch the FPS plumet to 20 FPS at HD airports and watch the video card just sit there at 40% usage. My brain tells me that if the game would just use the other 60% I could have the golden 30 FPS and be smooth with high details on. Why can I never get there? Is the ESP engine really that bad at using hardware, even with LM's heavily modified coding or do I just have a badly configured system? I wake up at night crying because my rig chews up every game on the market accept P3D. I haven't even bothered learning to fly the 777 as it sits around 18 FPS, even at default airports. My brain can't handle it. It's smooth but lagging with head movements. It is very immersion breaking. Other planes perform better but that's because they don't have 20 gauges running with detailed simulations of systems I am sure. Here is fun fact. Sitting at the gate looking at the buildings. The FPS in the A320 is about 23 with traffic on. When I look behind me toward the desert the FPS shoots up past 40 which of course yields smoother head panning. Heaven is behind me, hell before me. I should just fly but I keep hearing this nagging voice telling me "Dude, you have a powerful system… you have to be missing something." Okay.. I am rambling now. So apart from the usual "Shut up and fly" responses, is there anything you tech guys can think of that I might have screwed up or is this just how it has to be until we can have 8ghz processors?