How many times have we heard the question "what FPS are you getting with your setup?" Or "my setup only gives me 14 fps." But there isn't a reliable benchmark for comparison. Is your aircraft at Childress, Texas using default scenery, or at Newark using payware? You get my drift.Is there a reliable benchmark that we gat get everyone to agree on? Does one exist already? I've heard people say "excellent framerates even at Seattle" but in my experience, there's even a big difference in Seattle depending on where your aircraft is and what direction it's facing.Even comments like "with AI traffic at 100%" don't mean much because traffic seems to start out low and build over the next 15 minutes, with performance taking a hit as a complex model with lots of polygons taxis by. But then again, users with Ultimate Traffic (or other similar addons) So what can we do to establish (and popularize) some uniform conditions so that we can compare performance across systems? If we can do that, then we can get some good numbers about what difference a particular aircraft makes, or a new graphics card, or some more RAM, etc. What do you say?Unless there are already rigid benchmarks out there, I would propose this: Airport: KSEAHolding on runway 34R (facing the city taxes the system more)"Stormy Weather" themeDefault Cessna 2D panelAI traffic at zero (to control for nonstandard traffic add-ons)All other sliders completely to the rightBackground programs OFF (ActiveSky, Radar Contact, etc)Then: Specify explicitly any add-ons that might complicate the basic scenario, such as add-on mesh.What do you think? Has this been done before?---Will

Will,I was thinking about this exact same thing only yesterday.The only known benchmark to me is the one toms hardware did a while back to test VGA card performance.Check it out....http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/10/04/vga..._iv/page11.htmlSomething similar to this but more structured would be ideal IMHO.Glenn

It's been tried a hundred times. There are just too many variables to manage to make any comparisons meaningful. The only viable scenerio, IMNSHO, is a default FS2004 install with a fresh copy of WinXP updated to SP2 running on a clean partition with only the default XP services active. And even then you'd have to deal with the driver issues. Probably not something that most folks want to do just to get an FPS number.Doug

Doug,Agree about the variables, but as you say, using a stock installation would solve this.As for drivers and such, well that's no different to any other PC title.The above test by TH seemed to be heading in the right direction. I would like to see more benchmarking using FS9. Maybe the flighsim sites should be more active with this kind of thing?Glenn