Performance issues

[EmanueleCiriachi]

I started flying around with Flyinside for FSX and make no mistakes, it's an absolutely incredible product; its timewarp implementation makes it playable even on lower-powered rigs, and the hands-on experience is absolutely stunning (especially with a suitable control scheme).

I am, however, quite baffled by the general performance pre-timewarp: I have an FX-8350 with overclocked Radeon 7970, and I get ~20/25 FPS on average on normal resolution (standard DK2 full HD)?
Am I doing something REALLY wrong? Because even Star Citizen with VorpX runs at around 75 FPS on low detail.

EDIT: I monitored the CPU usage during the simulation and it never went beyond 40% - could the GPU be such a huge bottleneck?

[AWalter]

I have an 8350 and an AMD card also (R9 280x) I get poor performance as well. I have to put all my settings very low to get a good 35fps.

I would recommend you remove all traffic if possible, that is a good way to increase performance. My computer can run BF4 on ultra at 60fps, (No Oculus) and War Thunder w/ DK2 on Max settings at 75, but drawing all the square buildings in FSX is somehow to much for it. FSX has a pretty bad performance to graphics ratio.

[EmanueleCiriachi]

Apparently scenery, weather and traffic REALLY suck a lot of resources. After applying the following settings:

http://i.imgur.com/PSeNIVe.png

http://i.imgur.com/7UOldHR.png

my FPS jumped to around 60 with constant 75 timewarp. So much better!

[AWalter]

I always completely disable traffic and decrease cloud distance to minimum and I am still stuck with 30 fps.