Hi All,I thought I would share this with you as my eyes have been opened. Due to my vr920 getting exchange I decided to research in detail all I could to improve frame rates/ GFX quality and scenery within FSX. Below are a number of links and tips that are a must to prepare for the new firmware drivers allowing stereo in FSX.
FSX Settings Guide - To view frame rate in FSX press SHIFT+Z twice.
Frame rate scale
0-10 Poor
10-20 Not Good
20-30 Good
30-40 Very Good
40+ Excellent
Firstly review the recommened FSX settings here, you may to to tweak slightly dependant on system and GFX card type but using these base settings as a starting point worked great for me.
http://www.highflightsimulations.com/recommended.html
********Before Tweaking**********
Before you consider tweaking I would suggest you try the following as tweaking is not neccesary in most cases. Either partition a drive and do a seperate install of Vista or re-install Vista to give you a clean base to start from. The Vista install disk gives you options to retain old files but wipe old Vista installs.
The reason I suggest a fresh install is once full updated via windows update the first software you should install in is FSX, this means its right at the begining of your HD and improves the speed at which it can gather resources. So in this order:
1. Re-install Vista (Recommended for best results, or partition a drive and have 2 Vista installs. 1 dedicated for flight sim)
2. Get all relevant updates first
3. Install FSX, then run default free flight. Close
4. Re-boot
5. Install Acceleration (Comes with SP1 & SP2), then run default free flight. Close
6. Install all add-ons (VFR scenery highly recommended see below for advice)
7. Add all scenery using scenery library
8. Then run default free flight. Close
9. Re-boot
10. Clean files using Vista Maintanace
11. Run defrag
12. Play as normal, only use the tweaking guide below if you are not getting 20+ FPS from following settings guide and the last 12 steps. Here is how it looked after the above steps for me.
UPDATED 28/08/2008
13. So one final thing to change before you start fiddling, my example will be for Nvidia users. See screen grab below, the most common mistake to make is to use FSX in built Antialiasing & Texture filtering, I have an SLi configuration with 6GB dominator RAM and a Quad core extreme processer but was still getting poor FPS. Heres how to fix it.
14. Goto your Nvdia/ Ati control panel and select override application settings for Anitaliasing, just like my settings below. Untick the box in FSX for Antialiasing. You in effect taking a huge strain of your CPU as your GFX hardware is now controlling and doing all the work.
FSX Tweaking Guide - CFG File
NOTE: Make sure you back up every file before changing these settings!!
This tweak guide was great and could allow you to really smooth out your frame rate for average frame rates in the 30's. Use the recemmended tweaks and then adjust from there until you find the perfect balance. With the combinatioin of these two links and instructions you will have great groundings to start adding scenery that will really compliment the vr920
http://www.highflightsimulations.com/fsxcfg.html
FSX Tweaking Guide - Autogen
This is a simple but effective tweak with little to loss of quality.
http://www.highflightsimulations.com/autogen.html
Scenery
So you have spent several hours tweaking and fine tuning FSX and have a steady average frame rate of 25+
Choosing your scenery - TIP >> Choose very carefully
There is a wealth of both free and purchasable scenery so I will split this subject into two sections.
Freeware Scenery
FSX is now running SP2 and accelaration expansion as the two standards and in the good auld MS fashion you need to ensure that any scenery you get has been re-coded to work in one of the two builds. I would not advise installing any scenery that is not labelled as compatible with SP2 or acceleration.
WHY? Because as soon as you run it the frame rate drops like a bomb into the below 20 sink the ship send the vr920 back for a refund zone.
There are some links below to some resonably good supported freeware scenery sites.
One final TIP: You often have to switch off autogen for the region for which the scenery upgrade sits within in order to get it to look and function correct. I suggest testing if it does not work smoothly of the bat ditch it !
http://www.highflightsimulations.com/musthavefiles.html
http://www.simviation.com/fsxscenery11.htm
http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads-cat-91.html
Purchased Scenery
Do you want the ultimate UK scenery? I can suggest no other than Just Flights VFR Photographic scenery or horizons generation x scenery. As with freeware ensure that the addon is going to work, most purchasable add-ons will have a demo of sorts available and or reviews for you to read.
I could not find a better visual add-on than these to date (By all means post up suggestions)
Downside?
- For now all that is avaialble is England/ Wales (Although other countries are avaiable)
- Its in 3 or 4 volumes anything upto 60GB 
- The total package costs at least £65 quid (ouch)
Upside?
- Visually stunning
- 3D look and feel
- 1.2m per pixel
- 64 times more accurate than the standard fsx autogen scenery
- Improvement on frame rate! Yes thats right! Better frame rates
I am looking at other scenery addons to try but nothing compared to the results I got with VFR Scenery. I know that as soon as stereo is avaiable people will be blown away with the quaility of the simultation. See my link to test the demos
http://www.justflight.com/demos.asp (Scroll all the way to the bottom 3 demos)
http://www.horizonsimulation.com/shopeu/htmlarea/popups/VFRGenXJump-Demo.htm
TIP: Make sure you have followed the guides above before running this even on very high spec machines like mine.
*********BELOW NEW**********
So which scenery should I/ you go for? Its a tough choice, both Real Scenery and generation X have positives and negatives and I have trawled the net trying to find fair reviews of each to help me make my choice. To be fair to each I will try and resist the temptation to directly compare. So lets get my test specs out of the way first.
EVGA 680i sLi Motherboard
6800 Quad core extreme
Nvidia chipset
2 x (1GB) Corsair dominator DDR2
2 x 8800 GTX's in sLi single GPU mode
850W Silverstone Tech PSU
Microsoft Force Feedback 2 stick
vr920 + eye shield
FSX + Acceleration
Vista Home Premium 64-bit
So click on the below links to see the screenshots when running the demo from Real and Gen X compared to the standard Autogen scenery. You will be blown away!
http://www.alphabravoclan.co.uk/images/comp1.doc (Keep scrolling down)
http://www.alphabravoclan.co.uk/images/comp2.doc (Keep scrolling down)
So lets deal with Just Flights Real Scenery, this was the first demo I tried and was the motivation to post this thread. I thought it looked great especially over built up areas. Anything above about 400ft look cracking.
Real Scenery
Real scenery is being released in 4 volumes the last of this series which is released in January 2008. If you buy the first 3 you get the 4 free using Just Flights reward points scheme. All in all it will set you back a cool £75 smakeroonees (Ouch) BUT it will be worth every penny because once you have flown with photo realistic scenery (once you pop you just cant stop) you will not go back.
One of the best things with this scenery was that it was a breeze to install, very sleek and smooth with no obvious hick-ups. In addition to the basic photo scenery you also get night lighting textures & landable water in every lake, stream, river, canal, pond. You do not normally get night lighting and water included so its already more value for money.
As you will see from the pictures Real scenery changes the look of land rendering beautiful green textures in great detail at a max res 10meters. I felt that there was a little to many greens giving the mountain ranges a nice but completely realistic feel. That said the fact that there is landable water and night effects out the box gives it a good balance.
Over towns and more dense areas I feel Real scenery does a great job, the night lighting effects look great and its sometimes hard to remember you are actuall flying a simulator. They have spent allot of time cutting out all the airports so nothing conflicts with FSX and running at times at an astonishing 70 Fps this is a good safe buy. As its stands I would rate real scenery 8/10. There are no plans that am aware of to add Scotland 
(Can yo guess where I am from?)
Generation X
Generation X has been released in 3 volumes for cool and sligtly more palletable £70 quid. A smooth install was the first delight trying this demo, I here the full version is 60GB so be prepared for a long wait and lots of disk swapping just like the good old days. 60GB though WoW. Anyway lets put that to one side. What do you get for your money out of the box? Lets list it
- England & Wales photo realistic scenery
- No Lakes, rivers, streams.
- No night lighting
- Highest defination scenery available for E & W on teh market today
Whilst out of the box there is no night lighting or landable water Horizon are supplying this as part of a Free upgrade as soon as they have fine tuned the most realistic lighting and water they can, its all due for release in early 2008 so dont panic.
You will need to run a couple of patches to fix some areas of coastline and bugs which did not get sorted in the orginal release.
So once installed and patched what you have is I feel the most realistic looking mountain scenery for FSX ever. I have yet to see built up areas as they are not in the demo or I could not find them one of the two. But if its anything like the rich colourful mountain areas then you are in for a treat. You will see from my screenshots that the quality is just stunning and running at a cool 50fps just put the icing on the cake.
There are 2 other main benefits quoted by horizon using there scenery and thats they plan to add 3D content to all registered owners of Gen X. Have a look at their website and read the reviews for 3D london. Imagine flying over photo realistic scenery in london with a large part of the city filled with 3D buildings/ roads/ trains stations. Well they plan to roll out over time cities and landscape with a completely overhauled 3D content adding to the Gen X experience.
Secondly Horizon are working in direct conjuction with a chap called Gary Simmons designer and publisher of UK Airports Extreme. Airports Extreme is another add that for example put the most detailed and animated airports right into Gen X (Also copmatible with Real Scenery) I have had a look at Edinburgh airport and as a frequent flyer at Edinburgh I was surprised as to the detail and upto date 2008 layout of the airport. So watch out for the updated Acceleration & SP2 versions of Airports Extreme & UK Airports.
So when you look at what you have out the box its an 8/10 however when you consider the additional free content coming to all Extreme owners and the coalition between developers then they just and no more notch up to 9/10
***********ABOVE NEW***********
Summary
So am all set ready for FSX in stereo, there are loads of little extra addons for fsx so it pays to traul and spend the time looking for those little gems.
Good luck and post your specs and feedback about how you find FSX if you tries out the above.
Thanks
Alex