We are having a heatwave in New England, so these thoughts must be viewed as addled, but as I have been tinkering with settings to eke out another frame per second (and wringing out my brains over whether to ditch my Radeon 8500 for a GF4 4400, or maybe wait for the Radeon 9700), a fundamental principle occurred to me that I thought I would share--and a question. There is a fundamental principle in nature expressed in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that says, in the most general terms, you can't measure anything without perturbing it, and therefore what you measured ain't what it was before the measurement. Examples abound beyond the electron, which is what Heisenberg was originally concerned with. So I start to wonder, when we hit Shift-Z twice to get that frame rate counter and data display going, is in fact the determination of that information and its real time display actually diminishing the true frame rate, and if so, by any significant amount?? I suspect the answer is no, but one might conclude we'd be happier shutting the thing off and simply enjoy flying. Many have already concluded that, but I thought I'd just throw in the thought that maybe actually frame rate may be, like the electron, a forever elusive thing. It certainly changes all over the lot in my computer, but having said all this, I really believe 36 fps just looks better than 18 fps. Does anyone have a rig that can, with sliders maxed, give over 30 fps at Meigs (360 degrees heading, normal AI traffic, 4x antialiasing, scattered cumulous) sitting on the runway?? Thanks for any thoughts.Dick

Well, we also might throw in 'Schr

It is true that Shift Z causes a disturbance to FS. The clouds will be thin (or look like it). Shut off the FPS and the clouds come back to normal.FPS at 30,000 ft doesn't mean a thing. But on the ground, it is the tool that allows you to tweak the display settings of FS.My 2 cents worth (canadian).Pierre