Ok, we all like to see how cool our PC's are compared to other's!

But, then there are all those variables that make the results all so undefinitive.

Well, I figured we all have the default flight, so here is how to do the benchmark.

Go to your display properties and set your graphics drivers for the best quality settings you can rig up on your drivers. I just put all my sliders up to max with 4x antialising, all quality mipmapping settings etc. These settings are going to vary on different PC's and driver versions, but hey! It's the best we can do!

Start FS9, go to settings/display and slide every option, in every category, to max, click all the boxes etc. MAX IT OUT ! ! !    
(Make sure you unlock your frame rate limit to infinity!)

Now, some PC's won't accept all these tweaks and it will automatically drop back to whatever your card will handle, but hey! Who cares!

Now go to SELECT FLIGHT / OTHERS / DEFAULT FLIGHT (Change nothing)

Press Fly, now leave the brake on, don't move.

Press SHIFT + Z once or twice until you see this screen.

That's your benchmark!

Try to get a stable shot representitive of the average FPS. (or a bit higher! but please don't post in a freak glitch reading)



Oops! I don't think those are the default runway textures!  

congo,

I applauud you effort..... however you might remember I was trying to do this sort of thing a while back....and got too few "takers" out of the massive membership of this board.  The "standardization" idea is a good start.

But there are too many variables that have to be controlled to do this casually and have it at all meaningful.

Screen resolution.  Color bit depth.  Txtures in use.  Level of AI traffic.  Stock or custom AI traffic.  How many AI are in a vacintitiy at the time.  Are the AI planes stock or others.  How frame rate freindly are eht AI pplanes in use.

This could go on a while.

I too want some sort of definitive benchmar studies to help make sense of the hardware requirements for FS2004.  At the moment they seem to be somewhat illogical. 

I am sort of leaning to frontside buss speed and main RAM speed as being at least as important as the video card when you try to max ALL the sliders and chack all the boxes.  But there are apparent exceptions to THAT also.

So good luck........ I will watch this thread.

best,

...............john