ok, here is what I know...

Standard movies (in the theater) run between 16-20 FPS, so I set my FPS lock to 20.

Doing so reduces the load on the pc, and allows it to return better looking graphics..

Basically it's up to you, play around with it until you see a nice fluid movement on thescreen, without much or any quality degradation..

great if you have the hardware to sustain FS9 @ 60fps, plenty of users don't, especially @ high settings & Anti alaising.

so, what should I set it at?  I don't consistantly hit 60.  I have it at 40 now.

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Thats fine ,except, I did'nt post that. 

Actually, I read about some research into what FPS humans can detect, and 60 is around the figure from memory, and some people detect higher FPS.

I always wondered about that because I could still see jitters at 45 fps while flying in CFS2, and everyone said the eye and brain only detect around 28 fps.

More reading explained that the way images are displayed in film are completely different to the way PC graphics are displayed, so the film looks more fluid, and PC fps are much more noticeable.

The setting for FPS limit allows the CPU to dedicate more processing power to functions other than graphics once the limit is reached. In the case of a weak CPU, (by FS9 standards, this is nearly all CPU's), it allows a playable frame rate so that other data can be processed quickly and effectively if the other data is being held up, thus making the game run smoother.

The limit setting is a tradeoff, or more correctly, a balance between graphics processing and other calculations needed to run the game/sim smoothly.

The setting exists because the game will use more CPU power on some (most) systems than the system is capable of.

If you are running the game in window mode, you can check your CPU resource usage with windows task manager. You'll see it's using 100% of available CPU power, (unless you are one of the Autopilot's of this world!).

So, basically, FS9 is overworking the poor old CPU, limiting FPS relieves a bit of the graphics load. Setting it to the minimum FPS  that you are willing to deem playable should free up more CPU resources for better performance.

If you go too far with the limit, you might see windows task manager is showing less than 100% cpu utilisation as the CPU is then coasting along somewhat.

I guess the ideal setting would result in as close to 100% CPU utilisation while playing as possible, with minimal overloads. Mind you, I've never tried to achieve this, and I have always run FS with unlimited FPS, (probably incorrectly!).

Hope that explains it a bit more.  

Just passing this on.... can't say if it it TRUE or not......

A while back Computer Pilot magazine has a piece on "framerates" and in it they said that unlike in fs2002 the practice of setting framerates lower when using fs2004 actually made performance worse.  The said best performance in fs2004 was had with the frames set to unlimited.

I've played with both... and found the differences so subjective with the setup in the trailer below... that I can't say anything definitive one way or the other.

best,

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

Your eyes cant pick up anything past 30 from what ive read