Lock your framerate to about 24-28 and enjoy the better ecenery rendition.  Ignote the framerate counter.... it is not about framerates... it is about the smoothness of the flight and the scenery details.  Getting 40 fps out of fs2004 is great.  YOu are wasting cpu cycles on frames when it sould be used to improve the simulation.

best,

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

The fluctuations are visible, but if you lock the frames at say 30, it will look and run a lot smoother.

Tv has got somekind of blur between the frames, pc's (or whatever) have not.

But that wasnt my question. I just want to know if i can improve my performance, and how I can get that view button assigned!

Lordluud2 wrote on Jun 23^rd, 2010 at 6:06pm:



You are just not hearing the answer you want to hear.  Getting 40-60 fps in flight sim is excellent, more than most other people.  But to get it to run smoothly, you will have to limit your frames, end of story.

FS9 is no game.  It's a Flight Simulator.

BIG difference.

Think about all of the things it demands of your entire system,
all at once, and then that 40fps will amaze you, rather than disappoint you.   

An ordinary game, is following a set path of parameters & actions, in a very tiny world environment, with set environmental conditions.
Getting insane frames in these kind of games should be child's play for your system.

FS9 & FSX have to simulate the entire world,
with constantly changing variables, weather conditions, traffic, scenery,
plus the split second actions the pilot decides to make.
And it has to struggle to do all of this in the most realistic way possible within the confines of it's programming,
and how it operates on your hardware.

And you must realize, that your processor is taking the brunt of the load in all of this,
whereas a normal game is sending most of the work load to the Graphics card,
you should be thrilled to get 40fps with all sliders cranked.

I've never seen it on my system.

 

Lordluud2 wrote on Jun 23^rd, 2010 at 7:08pm:


I have an AMD quad core processor, with 8G of RAM and video card with 1G of RAM.  I am lucky to get high 20s-30s for frames, with sliders not even maxxed out.  Flight sim is very resource intensive, for the reasons listed by Shane.

That's because the stock planes are of a much lesser quality than the addons, and don't affect your system as much.

Less polygons, lower quality visuals, etc...

That would be Microsoft's smart buisness practices in action.   
By not making the defaults as good as they could have been, they are able to run easily on a wider variety of hardware configurations.

That's why I can fly Posky planes all day long just fine, but my system comes to a crawl if I load up a PMDG plane.

Lordluud2 wrote on Jun 25^th, 2010 at 2:23pm:






Those people are the ones who have tweaked, overclocked, and perfectly fined tuned every aspect of their system,
to insure that it runs its best.
The choice of various performance enhancing environment, and scenery addons also helps.

And I'm willing to bet, that none of those systems are pushing much over 20-30fps. 

The reason that FPS mean nothing in MSFS, is because the fps counter is flawed, and very inaccurate.
you can check this with Fraps, or any other utility that keeps track of FPS.

With MSFS, it's all about smooth appearance.
I've had my system locked at 20fps for years, and never notice anything unusual,
because it performs smooth, no stutters. 

That's the big secret of those systems you speak of -
You need to find the lowest fps setting that you can lock it at,
and still maintain smooth appearing flight,
and then you have effectively freed up a ton of CPU power to render all the eye candy. 

It's a big balancing act, that is 100% unique to every system. 
Even two identical setups, will need different settings to achieve the same goal.