Guys, I've read 100 times that people have their FS locked at XXfps, but what benefit does this give?If your machine will run at a higher fps, why lock it at a lower figure, and if the machine is low-end and will struggle to reach 15, why lock it at 20fps if it will never get there?I know there's an obvious answer to this and I'm missing something, but wouldn't the machine best be left to achieve whatever fps it can at any given time?The reason I ask is that I'm getting a uber-PC in a month, and I'm interested to know what it means if I lock in the fps. I'm currently running a 600Mhz with 128ram, so presently (I assume) locking fps probably won't help my sad cause.Appreciate any comments you experts will have.ThanksTim

Locking fps has different results in FS2002 and FS2004, and some things in common with both sims.... Here's my summary:For both sims, locking fps evens out the peaks and valleys in the framerate. This can be really helpful to improve the perception of fluidity. If you are cruising around open farmland and getting 20-30 fps, only to turn on final and see the fps drop to 10-15 fps, it's not the lower fps that annoy so much as the difference between what you were getting and what you get on final. Kind of like how slow a car seems to crawl when you go from a 75mph zone to 45mph.In FS2002, locking the fps also helped give resources to the sim for keeping textures fairly free of "dynamic blurring". The rule of thumb is you'd lock fps just a bit below your average fps, and the scenery engine could use whatever power was left over...In FS2004, the only benefit I've seen with locking fps is what I mention above--it smooths out the peaks and valleys. I found that keeping the fps set on unlimited actually seems better for texture clarity than leaving it locked. I have a couple of shots of a '337 in the screenshots forum, and in the second you can see how sharp the ground looks, despite the unlimited lock...Hope this helps...-John

So....it's to give an average flight sim experience? You don't see the best in order to make the worst seem not so bad?Am I understanding that correctly, albeit rather simplistically?Thanks for your time John.

That's a great way to sum up in a sentence what I said in a novel.... :)At least for FS2004, it's true. As I noted, in FS2002 a nice benefit from locking the fps was clearer textures.Still others have suggested the target fps is a "cutoff", below which MSFS starts to drop scenery detail in order to maintain the target. I think this idea originated from CFS 2, which supported this. In fact, in the .cfg file for FS2002 and FS2004 both, there's an Auto LOD flag which does nothing, but which performed this function for CFS 2. I've never seen MSFS adjust scenery based on what this slider is set at, other than the already mentioned texture updates.You'd be surprised though how smooth 15 fps starts to look if you cap your fps at a lower amount than the optimum. What we perceive is just as important as what the sim actually can do, especially since the sim is there to fool us that we're piloting the real thing.-John

That is a wee bit simplistic, yes. The purpose of locking the framerate is to allow the CPU do spend more time doing other work besides pushing textures down to the video card. There's *a lot* of background activity that has to happen (running the sim engine, loading stuff from disk, etc.) in addition to updating the screen. If the CPU falls behind because it's servicing the video card you're more apt to experience stutters when the sim finally reaches a point where it has to catch up. The appearance of fluidity is most apparent in the low FPS range (10-20) where the eye can more easily detect each frame being rendered.Typically what people do is run the sim under a variety of "typical" conditions (for them) with the frame rate unlimited and try to determine a good average rate. Then they can set the limit to be slightly less than that and expect to achieve it most of the time.

There's another difference with the way it works in FS2004, related to multiplayer games.FS2000 and FS2002 sent their location data to other players at a fixed rate of four times per second, but FS2004 sends its data at the same rate as whatever frame rate you're getting in the game. So if FS2004 is displaying 50 frames per second, it's also sending data to all other players in the session at a rate of 50 times per second, which is ridiculously high, and certainly could be considered a bug in FS2004.You can check your current frame rate by typing Shift-z twice, which will cause the information to be displayed with red text in the upper left corner of the screen. The only way to prevent FS2004 from sending data at such a high rate is to lock the frame rate to a reasonable maximum number of frames per second. To do this, go to the Options menu, then Settings, then Display, then select the Hardware tab, and set the "Target frame rate" to a number such as 20 or 25 (or if you're at the startup screen and not yet in the plane, click Settings in the lower left, then Display and then Hardware). You probably won't be able to see a big difference above this level anyway, and by keeping the data rate lower, you'll not only prevent other players on slower modems from being overrun with unnecessary data, but may see fewer planes jumping around the sky yourself.Russell