Well this is not a complaint about Steves DX10 but a lesson learned about low end systems and FSX. After much consideration I obtained the DX10 Fixer and installed it on my system.

Here is the outcome, it did everything it claimed, so 10/10 for that. The changes were great, particular the shadows which the Fixer even had showing in older Legacy aircraft quite well and I really love the cloud shadows on the ground and water. Overall it was wonderful and I was very satisfied BUT and here is the BUT, it killed my sim performance to the point of being almost unusable with DX10 selected. My FPS dropped from locked 30 to 6 and sometime even 2. There was no tearing or graphic flashes, just slow slow slow.

I investigated a number of tweaks I had no considered before but they only marginally improved the loss of performance as measured by FPS, curiously it was worse from the VC but improved with the outside view.

So near yet so far. The issue - while I had a 4.0GHZ CPU with 8 GB DDR RAM and a 2GB Video card, it was an older dual core Intel system and because it was an off the shelf system it had an older Intel G41 Video card and it was quite clear that FSX was overwhelming the GPU for the video card, end of story. So whilst DX10 did everything it said it would and the results were tantalising good not on this older system. So DX10 was deselected and I am back to DX9.

Solution well first as I always thought would be the case there is only such much performance you can squeeze out of the older hardware and chips and I can thank the DX10 Fixer for really making this very clear. So the only solution if I want those goodies, a new PC with a high performance CPU and a high performance Video GPU.