I thought the conventional wisdom was that locked frames were better. Yet, I notice significant improvement with some add-ons with unlimited frames. The Maddog is virtually unflylable for me in the vc with locked frames, but is passable with unlimted. CS 757 also does better unlimited. Both of those are known as not particularly frame-friendly.I have a Dell XPS 430 2 core Quad 2.6 6MB RAM w/GeForce 9800 GT. running FSX on Vista 64.Have I mis-learned the collective wisdom of the community or is there a reason some products do better on unlimited and some locked? (I'm not just talking about FPS, either, but smoother, too.)

I thought the conventional wisdom was that locked frames were better. Yet, I notice significant improvement with some add-ons with unlimited frames. The Maddog is virtually unflylable for me in the vc with locked frames, but is passable with unlimted. CS 757 also does better unlimited. Both of those are known as not particularly frame-friendly.I have a Dell XPS 430 2 core Quad 2.6 6MB RAM w/GeForce 9800 GT. running FSX on Vista 64.Have I mis-learned the collective wisdom of the community or is there a reason some products do better on unlimited and some locked? (I'm not just talking about FPS, either, but smoother, too.)

My understanding on the FPS limiter for FSX is like this...When you are locked at any FPS value, FSX will dedicate a percentage of system resources to rendering and then a percentage to CPU calculations. When your unlocked, it dedicates a higher percentage to the rendering processes. and takes away some percentage from the CPU calculations. If you are using an addon that requires a higher degree CPU, by using custom programmed stuff, then you will see less of an improvement if unlocked than you would if you were using a default aircraft that is utilising only the default sim engine for CPU usage because the addon is loading your CPU a bit more and causing the bottleneck to occur at the CPU rather than the GPU and the rendering engine.Someone please correct me if I am off base.JB

So, I think Captain Sim & Leonardo have both coded inside FSX more so than, say, PMDG MD-11. Well, anyway, I was just wondering about it since it makes such a big difference on some.(BTW, I'm sorry about not getting back on the multi-crew yet... the 757 is a jealous mistress :-) That project is taking up all my free time for now and most of the time I would otherwise be, oh. sleeping. Hope we try something out fairly soon. Now that I've forgotten everything I ever knew about the Maddog, except what to push to un-tilt the backup artificial horizon. I got that one covered, boss.)

Locking only makes sense if you're getting exactly 20/30 so you can properly vsync with your digital monitor and get the smoothest animation possible.... Outside of that unlocking frames will provide you with a higher frame rate in every situation, you can only lower your frame rate you can't increase them without better hardware or drivers. Otherwise the only way to increase them is by turning down the other graphics settings which control how long it takes for each individual frame.

I thought the conventional wisdom was that locked frames were better. Yet, I notice significant improvement with some add-ons with unlimited frames. The Maddog is virtually unflylable for me in the vc with locked frames, but is passable with unlimted. CS 757 also does better unlimited. Both of those are known as not particularly frame-friendly.I have a Dell XPS 430 2 core Quad 2.6 6MB RAM w/GeForce 9800 GT. running FSX on Vista 64.Have I mis-learned the collective wisdom of the community or is there a reason some products do better on unlimited and some locked? (I'm not just talking about FPS, either, but smoother, too.)

This is a commonly experienced phenomenon. For many though, running FSX in UNLIMITED leads to surges/spikes in video streaming to your monitor in certain situations. This can be effectively mitigated by using a freeware application called FPS_Limiter.exe. This is also a frame rate governor, but allows the optimizations inherent in FSX's UNLIMITED mode to continue unabated. Surges, caused by flucutating video demands while running UNLIMITED mode, will be eliminated or minimized by FPS_Limiter. This, running FSX in UNLIMITED + running FPS_Limiter.exe around 30 fps, has led to consistently excellent smoothness and overall performance on my platform.Do a search on this utility, if you haven't already, and find out where you can find it and use it correctly. I have run FSX without FPS_limiter and it really becomes quite poor by comparison. A nice feature of FPS_limiter is that you can change the frame lock in realtime using the F11 and F12 keys. Sometimes I notice car traffic, when FPS_Limiter.exe is set at 30 fps, is a little herky jerky. I simply tap the F11 key to take the lock to about 25 or so and this smooths out auto traffic. Then, when up in the air a bit, I hit F12 and go up to 30 or sometimes higher.

A nice feature of FPS_limiter is that you can change the frame lock in realtime using the F11 and F12 keys.

I'm using FPS_Limiter now, but I didn't know you could use F11 and F12 like that. Thank you for posting that Noel. I wonder what happens if I have F11 mapped to something in FSX...I wonder which will take precedence?

The limiter's commands will take priority.

The limiter's commands will take priority.

Ive found that the key combo's of Ctrl+ F11 Ctrl+F12 still effect the limiters FPS cap but do not activate the cam shifts FSX has mapped to F11/F12 give it a try it might save you a trip to the control options ;)LatersGizmo