I have been just tracking the updates and staying current. Its been quite a ride - it seems that graphics performance (limited as it was by …for e.g. rendering screens in the cockpit/UI in flight) seems to have trended downward.
More stutters with the latest (VR) patch than I have seen thus far. Photogrammetry causes artifacts in areas that don’t have it… (pyramids and spikes), the Rolling Cache stays off, as does live traffic. Running at medium settings on a i7 6 core, 16 GB RAM, GTX 970 ( minimal specs I know) … it was flyable in vfr with the settings I just mentioned in non complex areas.
IFR issues I will leave out for the time being … staying on graphics… the sim is NOT optimized to take advantage of current hardware. That is the reality. I appreciate the complexities involved, believe me I do, but even the rig I mentioned is only 20% utilized when the sim is running. I have memory and cycles and cores to spare.
Watching the Sim boot up along with a process monitoring tool is very instructive. Now that using these tools no longer causes CTD’s I am able to tweak, but have hit the brick of wall of what is currently accessible and possible in the released product.