I'm trying out xplane and so far I'm impressed. What I don't like is that the simulator tells me I have too many rendering options set and then reduces the visibility to compensate. I have tried to lower the frame rates a bit but it won't let me go below 19fps, why is that? And how do I change it?Acer Laptop 6530 2ghtz dual core4gb ramATI 512mb graphics cardThanks Gerry

Gerry,19fps is the lowest X-Plane allows. It's what is considered suitable without too much studder, and in order to sustain it, it will automatically create more fog should it need to.

I'm trying out xplane and so far I'm impressed. What I don't like is that the simulator tells me I have too many rendering options set and then reduces the visibility to compensate. I have tried to lower the frame rates a bit but it won't let me go below 19fps, why is that? And how do I change it?Acer Laptop 6530 2ghtz dual core4gb ramATI 512mb graphics cardThanks Gerry

Hi Gerry,According to Austin, X-Plane needs a minimum of 19fps in order to make a reasonable stab at keeping the flight modelling accurate. It's a bit of an arbitrary number, especially given that you can change the number of iterations of the modelling loop per frame elsewhere but hey, that's the way things tend to be in X-Plane. There is no setting for 'target frame rate' as there is in some other software, only this minimum.Looking at your computer specs I'm guessing that your graphics card should be able to deal with X-Plane ok (start with the settings low and work your way up until you run into trouble seems to be the best way to get reasonable performance). I'm also guessing that you're more likely to be CPU bound than graphics card bound so you might want to turn down items like forests, objects, roads and traffic down or off, and also ensure that you're only running one flight model per frame under Settings/Operations and warnings.X-Plane runs the main loop which includes rendering and flight modelling on a single processor core, only using the second core for loading scenery in the background, something which baffles me I must admit - there seems to be a natural separation between flight modelling and rendering which would mean that the procedure could be parallelized fairly easily.My personal preference is to set things up so I get about 25-30 fps in a reasonably 'dense' scenery which gives me a reasonable 'reality'. (With computer graphics you really need 50-60 fps as opposed to film but hey, it works for me).CheersSetanta

Hi GuysJust saying thank you for the information. As you say my processor is what is slowing things down, in FSX especially so I will try out your suggestions. Thanks again and really great that AVSIM is up and running again. Gerry