Regardless of the technical aspects and trickery of claimed frame rate performance, all the average end user wants of their computer is to be able to use their software for what it was intended to do.
In applications like flight simulators, this isn't the same for everyone. An Instrument Flyer is probably happy with rapid gauge and control response and an occasional look out of the cockpit, whereas a screenshot fanatic wants a quality rendering of his FS world.
PC performance and specifically video performance have always seemed to be lagging behind the software as far as mainstream users and affordability are concerned.
This has led to incredible frustration by the community at large and a seemingly desperate attempt for most of us to eek out that last little bit of performance from our machines so we can run our software.
Current mainstream hardware is something we could only dream about just a few years ago yet we still strive for performance to meet the software's requirements.
Some older software did amazing things on very poor (by today's standards) hardware. I remember running "Falcon" on an Amiga 500 and thought it was awesome. The Amiga was, I believe, a 7.14mhz cpu, 1/2 a megabyte of RAM
with onboard sound, video and no hard disk! It did the job in hand at the time, but only just!
Do the math, and think about the speed and capability of our hardware compared to then. However, we still face the same issues regarding the hardware/application performance ratio.
Albeit, we do want and indeed expect quality and complexity in our software we barely thought about years ago, but is this a valid excuse for our software to produce seemingly poor performance results on today's fantastic hardware?
I think not.
Frame Rates Wars Forever!!!!
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