Well, as FSX falls into more people's hands and experimenters try different things, the tweaks (effective ones) are now rolling in!
Good news for those of us that don't have FSX yet is that these tweaks also work in the demo version 2 that's been out for a coupla three weeks or so. Since performance changed a little bit between the first and second demo, I gave these tweaks a shot and am VERY happy with the outcome.
I'm sure everyone is starting a list of these but we need to manage one here for sure, more will come along and it would be good to have a little bit of local feedback on what works for folks and what doesn't. Here's the list I've started so far:
---------------------
Tweaked Scenery "AutogenDescriptions.spb" and related files:
Essentially reduces the number of types of trees and rooftops in the scenery, to reduce the total number of textures loaded at one time, thus freeing up GPU and system memory and resources. Definitely an improvement on my system with the FSX Demo 2.
Original source and discussion by the author here:
http://www.fox-fam.com/wordpress/?page_id=41
As well as the first post at Avsim about it:
http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=121&topic_id=354861&mode=full
---------------------
Fiber Frame Time tweak:
Allows for configuration of the timeslice for texture rendering, can definitely increase FPS and looks...essentially needs to be tweaked to each PC, I use 0.15 on my system now, others report success with the setting as shown which goes in FSX.CFG under the [Main] section:
[Main]
FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.33
Discussed here in PC-12's developer blog: (and at Avsim and others)
(see the "No More "Blurries?" entry:
http://blogs.technet.com/p-12c_pilot/default.aspx?p=2
--------------------
Another Autogen Tweak from PC-12's FSX Blog:
blogs.technet.com/p-12...-help.aspx
(Discussed a bit more here:)
http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=121&topic_id=358115&mode=full
I'm using this as well with the FSX Demo 2 and definitely also seems to help very much. I have settings at 100 and 200 respectively:
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=100
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=200
(This is much lower than given in other examples but I'm happy with it, and remember you don't want to go with a value less than 10 to avoid problems)
-------------------
Bandwidth Tweak:
Same as for FS9 if your system suports higher transfer speeds (most do):
In [Display] section of FSX.cfg file:
TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=400
(essentially changes it form 40 to 400)
-------------------
Unlimited FPS tweak:
Not really a tweak so much as a discussion (again at Avsim and other places), this focuses on using the "Unlimited" FPS setting to really give more performance. I have to say there's meat to this argument. With my FPS set to 30 or 40, I wasn't reaching those numbers, but with it set to Unlimited, now I do - and flying from inside the VC is INCREDIBLY silky-smooth in the demo. Actually hit 60FPS a few times on my year-and-a-half old rig!!
Only drawback is the system is obviously giving 100% of it's resources to FPS, which can be seen by some flickering of 2D pop-up panels like the throttle quadrant, etc sometimes. But worth trying out IMHO!
--------------------