Setup, Configuration, Drivers, Tweaking

I have had FSX for many years. I bought the Gold edition, which includes the Acceleration add-on. The game is already 9 years old, so should run pretty smoothly with a fairly up to date PC. My system is Windows 7 Professional, 8GB RAM, AMD Phenom II 965, Nvidia GTX 760. It is a system I built myself, based on a Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H Motherboard. It's not totally up-to-date, but should be more than capable of running FSX at maximum settings. I have a BenQ GL2460 monitor and a Speedlink Blackwidow flight stick. Previously I have played FSX with a Microsoft Sidewinder precision joystick.

After initial installing, I was very surprised by the really choppy graphics, the game running very, very slow even with graphics turned right down. I came across the solution by chance, in that I got a debug error window from Visual C++ runtime. The message was to do with "Damage after normal block", that sounds quite serious! I opted for ignore and Googled the error message. Turns out the error is associated with the Blackwidow drivers, so I uninstalled the drives and fall back to using the default Windows 7 USB Game controller drivers. The performance difference was remarkable. Not only did it fix the VC runtime error, but my frame-rates went through the roof.

I tweaked my FSX.cfg file that I located in C:\Users\Mark\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\FSX

These are the settings I added to the default config file:

[JOBSCHEDULER] 
AffinityMask=14
[BUFFERPOOLS] 
PoolSize=0
DisablePreload=1
[GRAPHICS]
HIGHMEMFIX=1
ForceFullScreenVSync=1
TextureBandwidthMult=100
[TERRAIN]
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=1000
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=800

I had bought Flight One Software's Ultimate Terrain X Europe + USA and Ground Environment X Europe + USA, I also have France VFR scenery for all of Bretagne (Brittany).

I have some extra aircraft from Just Flight's Flying Club X, which I picked up from a charity shop.