EMFM,

You should be able to do much better on the graphics than what you mentioned.

Defrag. Install. Defrag again. It's worth it.

First off, did you install the patch? It's about 200MB and will up your FPS by 50%.

Lock your frame rate at about 20 FPS.
Put cloud draw distance to minimum.Put the scenery draw radius to medium.
Kill the bloom effect. No machine can run it and live.
Kill all AI traffic. Planes, boats, cars, airport vehicles.
Keep the water effect in the 1X range. Try 2X after.Max all your scenery sliders and see what happens.

The auto-gen is the killer, that's what puts the trees and building in the scenery. Start high and work back until you float around 20FPS. (Shift+Z gives you readouts.) Most people find 20 FPS pretty good. Some are okay with as low as 15-17. Anything over 25 is gravy.

Read this: http://ops.precisionmanuals.com/wiki/FSX_FPS_Guide


From a previous post to Edyz:

*By the by, here's a good tweak for you. In the FSX.cfg file (it's in C:\Doc & Settings\User name\ Application Data\ Microsoft\'FSX) add these lines to the end of the Terrain section: (Back up your .cfg first!)

TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=4500
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=3000

It will allow you to chose how many trees and buildings you want the sim to render at any one time. I think 6000 is the max number. (It's also a number you will never use.) I prefer less buildings and more trees. Fool around and find the best balance for what you want. Start low (1000) and work your way up until the frame rate suffers