active SCA - San Diego Area performance

[FalconAF]

While there are some very knowledgeable posts above about FPS, many of them are still missing the point.  It's not just the number of frames per second you get in a computer "game" or "simulation".  It's a COMBINATION of the number of frames you can produce IN THE SIMULATOR , the REFRESH RATE of your monitor displaying those frames, and whether the "scenery" is moving or not (and how fast) in your field of view.

 

I can sit you down in front of your computer, set your flight simulator to produce only ONE frame per second update, and in some cases you would NOT be able to tell the difference between that 1 FPS coming from within the simulator, nor 60 FPS, or even 200 FPS.  Don't believe me?  Try it yourself.

 

Park your airplane.  Turn off your AI aircraft and ground vehicles.  Make it so NOTHING you see outside the cockpit window is moving.  Now, even with a 1 FPS setting in FSX or P3D, with a monitor refresh rate of 60Hz, what will happen is that ONE frame from the flight sim will just be "refreshed" 60 times per second on your monitor display.  It will be the exact same frame, but you wouldn't be able to determine that your simulator was only updating the frame once per second FROM WITHIN the SIMULATOR, wile your monitor was displaying that SAME FRAME 60 times in that one second.  And increasing your simulator FPS's to even 60 FPS wouldn't change anything.  At 60Hz refresh rate, your monitor would just update 60 separate frames from the simulator that EACH showed exactly the same thing...nothing was MOVING in those 60 frames.

 

Now, turn on your AI and have something move across the screen in front of you.  If that object takes only TWO seconds to cross the monitor, it will only be "drawn" TWICE from the simulator at 1 FPS update in the simulator...once each second in the 2 seconds it takes to cross the screen.  But at 60Hz refresh rate, in those 2 seconds you will see 60 "copies" of the first frames drawn in the first second, then 60 copies of the second frame drawn in the second second.  During EACH of those seconds, the object moving in the "scene" will NOT move on the screen.  At the end of the first second, it will JUMP from the first frame drawn by the simulator, to the NEXT frame drawn by the simulator.  There will be no "smooth moving" of the object across the screen because there COULDN'T be with only two frames being drawn in that 2 second time by the simulator.  This is also why any claim of uber FPS's in flight simulator like 100 FPS are meaningless on a 60Hz refresh rate monitor.  If the monitor is only refreshing the screen 60 times a second, then 40 of those 100 FPS "udates" would never be displayed to begin with.

 

The FPS display in Flight Simulator is a BENCHMARK ONLY.  It is NOT the determining factor in how SMOOTH any movement across your monitor screen will be.

 

Having "smooth flight" in FS-whatever simulator you use depends on what you are ASKING the simulator AND your display hardware to do at the SAME time.  ONE frame per second in FSX works just FINE if nothing on your monitor is moving anywhere.  On the other hand, take an F-16 and do a 90-degree per second turn in it for 360 degrees, and you better have some very high FPS capability within the simulator, AND a high enough refresh rate to update the monitor images fast enough.  Think about it.  THAT 360 degree turn will only take you 4 seconds to complete.  Your simulator AND monitor will have to display a complete 360 degree "panorama" during the turn.  At 30 FPS in the flight sim, that means that each new frame will have "moved" sideways 3-degrees per frame (90 degrees per second divided by 30 frames).  At 60 Hz refresh rate, each of those frames will updated on your monitor TWICE...your monitor will show the SAME frame 2 times before it moves on to displaying the NEXT frame that did move.  You could still perceive "jerky frames", but would more likely perceive "blurry textures" as the scene paraded in front of you.

 

Make the same turn in a Cessna 172 at 3 degrees per second (a "Standard Rate Turn" in aviation) at 30 FPS and 60Hz refresh rate, and it's a completely different story.  At a 3 degree per second turn, FSX at 30 FPS will draw 30 frames that only change your view ahead at ONE TENTH of a degree per second sideways.  Your monitor at 60Hz refresh rate will still display each frame twice per second, but you would have to be Superman to notice any "stuttering" of the scenery passing sideways across your monitor.

 

THAT is why many people CAN fly complex scenery with the scenery sliders "maxed out".  If they aren't using complex airplanes, but instead are flying in a "graceful" manner across the scenery, everything works just fine for them at even 15 FPS in Flight Simulator.  Wanna fly over complex ORBX scenery like NA SCA and into complex addon airports within it, WITH a complex airplane?  Keep looking out the FRONT cockpit window on final approach.  The field of view doesn't change SIDEWAYS drastically then.  AFTER you land, select the "Replay" option in FSX or P3D, set it for the last 6 minutes of time if you want, THEN go back and look at all the pretty scenery in the REPLAY...not when you were trying to actually land the plane while switching views all over the place, etc.  

 

EDIT:  The forum locked up on me while I was typing the above post.  Had to exit the forum then resume typing it after it got posted "incomplete".

 

 

[FalconAF]

To clarify something in my above post....

 

Comparing the FPS of a MOVIE with the FPS the FLIGHT SIMULATOR counter says it is "creating per second" CAN NOT BE DONE to produce an accurate description of what is happening or what you will see in the simulator.  ONE frame per second for a movie projected on a movie screen would of course be unacceptable...but the key to understand in this case is that the one frame per second is ACTUALLY the REFRESH RATE of the frames that would be displayed on the movie "screen" then.  In Flight Simulator, even if the sim is only creating ONE frame per second, the computer and monitor at a 60Hz Refresh RATE will still display that one frame 60 times per second.

 

To compare movie "frame rates" with "frame rates" in Flight Simulator properly (or any "game" being displayed on your computer monitor for that matter), you need to compare the movie frames per second rate to the REFRESH RATE of your computer monitor.  That is the relation between how many "frames per second" you are actually seeing between the movie and your monitor.  The number of frames per second shown in the Frame Rate Counter in Flight Simulator are meaningless for the comparison.  Saying something like somebody needs at least 24 FPS showing on the FSX Frame Rate Counter as a minimum because that is the minimum "frames per second" for a "smooth movie" is incorrect.  The 24 FPS for the movie simply have no relation to the 1 FPS on the Frame Rate Counter in FSX.  What they ARE related to is the 60 FPS Refresh Rate of a monitor running at 60Hz (or whatever Hz and number of refreshes the monitor produces).  

 

For some flight sim users, even 15 FPS showing on the FSX Frame Rate Counter will work just fine.  The REAL number of FSX Frame Rate Counter frames per second you need depends on how much MOVEMENT there is of objects in the scene, and how QUICKLY they are being displaced from one location to another in the scene you are watching.  15 FPS from FSX will still get displayed 60 times a second on a 60Hz rate monitor.  As long as you aren't flying like a bat ouuta hell over the scenery, or making high-G tunes at excessive turn rates that cause massive movements horizontally or vertically across your monitor, "smooth flying" without stutters is totally possible even at 15 FPS shown in the FSX Frame Rate Counter.  It can all depend on the TYPE of flying you do, and what you are asking your computer and the flight sim to display for you "smoothly". Of course, if you load up your sim enough with complex aircraft and complex scenery (and like JV said...4096 HD textures all over the place like clouds as far as you can see) that demand lots of your computer's processing power to the extent THAT slows down FSX's ability to update frames fast enough, you will see "pauses" and "stutters" between the frame updates because the sim has to compromise on what it updates where and when.  That is also why CONSISTENT frame rate numbers that don't fluctuate all over the place are better than higher frame rate numbers that do fluctuate.  It is totally possible that someone with consistent 15 - 20 FPS rates will get "less stuttering" and "smoother flying" than someone "benchmarking" with the FSX Frame Rate Counter getting higher frame rate numbers that jump all over the place.