Depends on your definition of compromises I suppose: one should be careful to assume that everybody’s objectives are the same as one’s own. My objective is great graphic quality at what I consider to be reasonable frame rates. I will just quote what I said in my original post: “I am completely satisfied with this performance and have no desire or intention to upgrade.” Again: I am running 4K at 100% scaling on essentially all Ultra. Terrain level of detail is 300, Object level of detail is 200. Does that constitute a compromise in terms of frame rate? Apparently for you yes. For me, no.
While I get 40 - 50FPS in most of the flying I do and while I get 40+ over New York and while I get around 30FPS with occasional drops down to under 30 in an extremely demanding airport like the aforementioned FSimStudios CYVR AND FSLTL (both known to impact FPS quite a bit), I am totally happy. Because the graphics are simply stunning. And that is what I want.
FOR ME, dropping the quality to get a higher framerate would constitute a compromise. And to have to upgrade my CPU to achieve said increase would be an unacceptable price to pay for something I do not want. Yes, my $500 was for 5800X3D so that was the high end. But even a 5700X costs around Canadian $300 after tax and shipping. And I have great doubts as to the amount of improvement I would get with that with my settings.
The 4K TAA comment is key. Sorry but, seeing as I AM using 4K TAA, my GPU is typically maxed out with the settings I use, so I just cannot see getting a meaningful FPS increase with a slightly better CPU. And as mentioned: I am NOT prepared to compromise on quality. 