A while ago I saw a chart where it explained in detail which settings where more CPU intensive, or GPU, or both.
Anyone knows where it is?
Anyone knows which exact settings on the Sim are Key for CPU usage?
Please no guessing games, I already have an idea in that area. Just facts 
Thank you.
Cheers.
Do you mean this?
For my “mainthread” limited PC (with a good old 7700K) I found the most impactful setting to be the LOD distance. I have it at 150 for fast moving aircraft (airliners, jets) and 250 for low and slow GA aircraft. Though ymmv. Good luck! 
Terrain/object LOD distance
Hey! I’m also running a good old 7700K
And I’m squeezing every bit of processing power out of that Grandpa.
I’ll post my settings later so we can compare.
About the LOD, I started playing with 400 as soon as it was available.
Then NIS scaler came along and tweaking here and there I was getting great performance.
Always in VR, btw.
Then I realized that 400 was a bit too much and settled for 300, which is what I’m running today.
Now with OpenXR Toolkit.
In my experience, I see no performance gain going to LOD 100, don’t ask me why. Ok, perhaps 1 or 2 fps.
But this is running at 35 fps, so I’m happy.
I’ll post my settings later and we can see how we match.
Regards.
Oh, what I’ve noticed is that any weather with huge amounts of ‘spray’, kills the fps, -10.
Flying today over Bastogne, trying to find the location of Easy Company, you know, Band of Brothers, this became very apparent, as the weather was exactly like that, heavy clouds, tons of spray.
This is to me the biggest hit in performance.
Even setting clouds at High, which normally I run at Ultra, seems to make little impact in regaining fps’s.
That’s the one.
Thank you!
Here it is:
3080Ti Overclocked +800, +110
i7 7700K, Overclocked at 4,9Ghz Stable.
32 Ram
Reverb G2
HAGS On
Game mode Off
Nvidia 511.66
Anisotropic Filtering 16x in Nvidia settings, off in sim.
Open XR 250%
Motion Off
FSR 65 (3250x3180) If I need extra frames I play with FSR between 55 and 65, the clarity is still amazing for me.
Sharp 100
World Scale 94
Sharpness in config file Off.
This made a huge difference.
30 - 36 fps in flight, 26 - 30 fps on the ground.
Clouds Ultra, LOD 300, Resolution 100, the rest Ultra except, Trees High, Grass and Bushes Mid, Ambient Occlusion High and Contact Shadows High.
Cool to see the 7700K still going strong out there!
I’m running it at 5GHz with an RTX3080 no oc.
My settings are also mostly ultra except for texture resolution (mainly because ultra will exhaust my GPU’s measly 10GB VRAM).
I fly in 3D (no VR headset yet), and I usually get 40-50 FPS, the FBW a320 is the one that brings the performance down to 25-30 at major airports.
My resolution is 3440x1440, scaling at 100, game mode on and HAGS on. No other config tweaks.
I also noticed that clouds do tend to bring down the performance but they’re mainly GPU limited, in my case I’m mostly CPU limited so the LOD is where it’s at. I can probably bring it up to 300 but I’ll be sacrificing 10 FPS or so, so I chose the “higher” framerates instead 
Have you tried turning HAGS and Game Mode off? I believe it’s suppose to have a positive impact but not sure.
Hopefully DX12 will settle of these CPU bottlenecks.