Frame rates

[Firebird]

Gents,

I discovered something yesterday which surprised me as I didn't think that there was anything new to learn about FS9.

During some testing something came up and by chance a fix was discovered and it led me to wonder about other peoples setup on their systems.
Right back in the mists of time one of the most common topics in the world of FS9, and it continued in FSX, was how to bet the most performance out of your computer setup for the game. One of the things was to put a cap on frame rates. It was one of the things to cure stuttering in game. The narrative went something along the lines of that the human eye sees at no more than 24-30 fps so why waste processing power on your graphics card by having the upper frame limit set any higher.

For years now in game I have had my fps limit set to 30. At the time it did indeed seem to help a fraction with smoothness in game.

Of course, things have changed a bit. I think it is safe to say that most people have changed their 'puters and their graphics cards since then, but I still left the setting the same.

Any long story short somebody reported a problem with the fde I made for JYs Typhoon but two of us could not reproduce the issue. I made some changes to the fde as I was able to reproduce easily in a certain set of circumstances and the issue disappeared. When it was retested the problem still remained for the reporter.
After much head scratching and teeth gnashing it was eventually discovered that the frame rates on the 'puter that reported the issue was set to a limit of 24 fps. When the limit was raised to 30 fps the person that reported the issue got the same results as the two of us.
So decided to do some testing. I removed the fps limit in game and backed out the changes I made and reran the test that was able to reproduce the results of the reporter. Hey presto, the problem was no longer there.
I retested again with the limit set to 60 fps and again the problem did not show.

So it would seem that although the human eye doesn't see anything more than 30 fps the frame rate does indeed influence the results in game. So I decided to describe all this and see what other people had their fps settings set to to see whether if others too had settings low enough that they could be experiencing things that they didn't need to.

As a final note I remember back in the early days of FS9 I could get around 36 fps which was why I decided to save any graphics processing I could do. When I ran the test yesterday with no limit I was getting up to 330 fps. my machine is not the fastest nor is my graphics card is not the newest so I think that maybe most people if not all could probably easily manage over 30 fps and get a better experience in game. Although I am talking specifically about FS9 here I am equally sure that improvements could be gained in FSX/P3D in the same way.

So does anybody have frame rates of 30 or lower? What happens to the smoothness of the aircraft if you raise the frame rate limit up?

[JohnTenn]

Steve

I had 24fps set in FS9. I experienced what seemed like a magnetic brake and then release when approaching untextured Gmax objects.

Set frame rates to 60 and stutter in same high density area is almost imperceptible.

I also used Nvidia inspector for the first time in years. I can not believe what I was missing.

John

[Firebird]

Glad it was useful info, John.
It goes against everything that you did back in the early days when you had to wring every bit of performance out of your PC. Once you use Nvidia inspector you will always wonder how the hell you put up with those jagged edges.

Anybody else find it useful, or was everybody else just smarter than me to start with?

[SeanG]

Also, and interesting note on framerate in FS9... when we use our clever 'timer' code in XML animation it appears to be tied to the framerate, so an animation triggers in half the time at 60FPS as it does at 30FPS.... It seems that the timer 'ticks' at the same rate as the screen-draw frames.

Interesting, but of no real value, observation

SeanG

[Firebird]

I shall look for that. Ta.