That may very well but the worst I saw at JFK was 26 locked at 29 and that was near the terminal at night after a 6 hour flight.
Which clearly proves you (modified) KORD installation have problems that are relevant to your system only, because that KORD is faster than JFK is widely known.
I know for a fact that there was some 16 bit textures in the folder. I wouldn't have changed anything if it was all DXT3 or DXT1
You are now confusing bit depth with compression format. DXT1 IS 16 bit, because colors are encoded with 5:6:5, 5 bits for Red, 6 for Green, 5 for Blue and 1 bit of Alpha, which totals exactly 16 bit.
What you were trying to say, probably, is that you believe some textures came in 16 bit uncompressed format. But this is not the case, from the original installer as we distribute, there are NO NON-DXT textures in the KORD texture folder, not a single one. Some of them are in DXT1, some are in DXT3.
So, exactly as I've said (twice) by "reducing" everything to DXT3, you haven't reduced anything but, instead, have increased the size (for nothing) of all the former DXT1 textures into DXT3.
As I've said before, if a texture has an Alpha channel that is just black and white, so it can be expressed with 1 bit, it will be a waste of both space and speed using DXT3.
AND, if a texture doesn't even have an Alpha channel to begin with, using DXT3 will cause slowdowns and stuttering, you HAVE to use DXT1 for it, and since you "reduced" everything to DXT3, without taking into account how the source texture was, this might explain some performance problems.
I'll repeat it again: there are no 16-bit uncompressed textures in KORD as we distribute it. And this can be easily proven by clean installing the current installer, taking care to *remove* the texture folder before installing, otherwise your new modified textures will not be overwritten, and you might be misled thinking they are in 16 bit mode, when they were probably a result of some tweaks you tried, which you might have forgotten. OR, if you used some kind of batch utility to do this, they might have been temporary files created by that utility to convert back and forth, but they are NOT coming from our installer, this is for sure.
I'll post a picture of my settings later tonight or tomorrow to prove it.
It's not that I don't *believe* you have these settings, it's that you SHOULD'T get these performance with "all settings to minimal" as you said. But this is not even relevant to KORD: you said your system can run at 50-60 fps ? Well, if that figure is with "all settings to minimal", then something is VERY wrong with your system, or it's very old, because FS9 with "all settings to minimal", should run WAY faster than that.