I'm afraid its all trial and error.  Every system is different and will handle stuff differently.  You yourself have to experiment and you have to decide what you are happy with FPS wise. 

I will say the clouds in FS2004 really hurt FPS if set high and also AI set at 100% will hurt the performance too.  You have to find the settings that you think make it look nice but dont hit performance but as said you have to decide on this.

Turn ANTI-ALIASING   off  in the sim's display settings.

mip mapping quality 4

Hardware rendered lights 6

global maximum texture size High

resolution 1024x768x32

Autogen Dense

Weather: sight distance 80, cloud distance 40, 3d cloud percentage 100, detailed clouds, cloud coverage density maximum.

Terrain detail, land only

Water effects off

Everything else maxed out.



Go to your Video card's driver settings, set 2x antialiasing, anisotropic filtering 2x or none, Set best quality mode. Turn off vertical sync. Use 53.03 or 53.06 driver.

Drop the AA and AF filters as above to zero if you fly in a lot of cloud.

Download performance cloud textures

Don't fly around dense cloud!


More tweaks: http://skysserver.com/tweaks.html


Fix your computer, from your post here it seems you have a 2ghz CPU running at 1.8ghz.

Save money for new video card.