I have a Pentium 4 3.2ghz with that fake 2-core trick, 2GB of good RAM and a Radeon 9800 256mb.
I'm still trying to tweak it, but with special effects at max and the best Aircraft quality, I have to lower everything else except for Airline and General Aviation traffic to the lowest setting or bare minimum to stay above 20FPS. And the FPS will go down to 10 or 15 if I look at crumped AI traffic. What the hell Microsoft, how about adding low polygon, low texture models for the damned AI? It's not low enough, make them a flat paper 2D texture.
What did MS do wrong? I don't understand anything about programming, but since that never stopped me from commenting before: it seems the road, airport and naval traffic completely crushes my CPU, innefficient coding? Or is it meant to run on quadruple-CPU PCs? What's the point of adding all this glitter if your average CPU can't handle it? Can that new Intel chip handle it? Or should I save to buy four of them?
When you put everything at the best settings, the world is beautiful, truly stunning, despite the 3 to 5 FPS. Merit where merit is due, congratulations to Microsoft for creating a world worthwile to do long flights in, appreciating the scenery. But with the settings down to a minimum, it's the same world from FS2000 or whatever: dull, boring, repetitive, empty.
Any performance tips are welcome. I can only suggest removing all traffic. And start saving for CPUs and Graphic cards that are so advanced you won't be able to play your older games anymore.
FSX is truly fantastic if you can run it. I can't.