Hello everybody,Could you share your experiences about the fps settings you have set.Some forums advide 18-25 fps for the most smooth and best looking scenery, while others advicee sttings the framerate slider to unlimited.Thanks for sharing,

This must be one of the most talked/posted about subjects in FS( Frame rates).Personnally - I don't think it matter that much except that ----1: If you use a reasonable setting (30fps?)it may help to iron out the visible differences between good fps and poor as you view different scenery .2:Setting to unlimited is OK but ,again my personal opinion - I think that using a moderate setting perhaps gives your system a little bit of "breathing Space" in that it isn't flogging itself to the max all the time.Just my opinion - others will no doubt differ.Dave

Personally I have mine set to 25. On my system it never goes below that. I am happy.

I have mine set to 30 and am happy there. I don't know the total implications for smooth operation of FS2004, but it is my understanding that the human eye sees smooth motion as long as the fps is greater than 16 fps. Maybe there is an eye man on the forum that can clarify this.Since the lower level the system tries to use is about 70% of the maximum value, if you want 16 fps as the lower level, then the maximum should be set around 23 fps. So, 25-30 fps seems a good choice.

I just happen'd to be spending a bunch of time last night horsing around with the slider. Having just installed the nvidia driver always makes me do this. New driver "what can it do" sorta thing happens with me. A few points.When I set the slider to a lower setting say 16 I get 10-16 frames a sec. When I set it to 20 I get 16-20 frames a sec and so on. I almost never get smooth frames I'm on a 2.4gig system with a meg of memory and still no smoothness at least at times. I have mine set to 20. It seems to work pretty good.I do find that both the reflections in the water 'the water texture set to the highest' or the cloud setting set to scattered seems to impact on frames. I fly in the mountains quite a bit so I'm thinking it's because of the auclusions. Mesh in front of something (water or clouds) that hit the frames pretty hard. So when in the high country I have the water texture turned down and the clouds turned up. I can live without the fancy water.Advice-- Don't set it to the lowest setting you will get the lowest setting or even lower. If your watching your FPS set it to the highest average setting. The one it doesn't go above. Atleast you know that is the best it can do. Depending on where you fly. You will find atleast I have that you have to move the sliders for each type of flying that you do. It would be cool if you could have a few presets and lock them to area's that you fly and then they would automatically adjust and save you from doing it over and over again. Flying shouldn't envolve moving the sliders all the time to get the best frames.No doubt about it...Ronson2k

This is so much a personal preference type of thing. I find that I lock mine at 24, I get good results. If things drop off a bit, they still stay around 20 which is still smooth enough for flying. The only time I find that 24 is too low, is when flying fighter jets. Then I tend to notice things are a little too jittery. I rarely fly these kind of jets anyway so it isn't a big issue for me.

Hi,Does the framerate slider not control the dynamic scaling of scenery detail?.I.E. if you set your slider to 25fps and the sim dips below this the sim scales the scenery to increase the fps?.I always though this was the case, but I may be wrong.I think the best thing to do is use the average framerate option in the fs9.cfg, got to a moderately complex airport with a moderately complex plane and some AI and see what average framerate you are getting and set it to that.I personally have mine set to 30fps, it very rarely goes below this, and I find that setting it to unlimited produces wierd results when at alt, i.e. 150fps makes the sim feel wierd.Dan.

I used to run with mine set at around 25 fps, and this tended to result in reasonable performance but with frames between 10-25 depending on scenery (airports) etc, or at altitude.However, I recently purchased the great UK VFR scenery and new terrain add-on, and in the documentation in states "IMPORTANT" that the fps slider MUST be set to unlimited.Since then I have run with it on unlimited and am getting much better fps generally without it would seem much degredation in scenery textures. I have found though, that unless you have a mega machine, it is worth turning off AI aircraft altogether, as this makes the most impact on fps / stuttering. If it was possible to limit the range that the system sees AI aircraft to say 5 miles, that may help if one wanted to view AI aircraft just around the airport, but I havn't found a way to do this. If anyone knows of any settings in FS9 that restricts the range of AI aircraft please, please post it here or email me.Best regards,Stuart Hyett

I've fiddled with this exact same problem for some time now, and I have settled on 24FPS as the frame lock for several reasons.1. 24FPS is motion picture quality and smooth enough for me in almost any situation.2. Although setting to unlimited can give me even better performance at cruise, I find that when looking out the sides and back, setting the slider to unlimited causes the textures on the ground to load more slowly. The whole texture paint issue to me causes me to lose immersion to begin with, so at unlimted, waiting th 1/2 to 1 sec for the textures to load on the mesh just doesn't do it. At 24fps locked, the textures load faster (in my opinion) and although the pause is still there, it seems that the textures load faster and I can pan longer and more often before causing another texture load.

FS2004 WITHOUT AI?, OMG what a sacrifice, I couldnt imagine going to an empty airport.Dan.

I used to keep mine locked at 25...about my average fps given my mix of sliders. But I found something which was quite the opposite of FS2002--ground textures would tend to blur over time, especially on longer flights. Then I read somewhere where someone had set it to unlimited and found the sim far smoother. I gave it a shot, and by gosh the ground texture issue went away--flying in the face of convention based on my experience with FS2002.A question was raised whether the fps slider causes the sim to scale scenery detail based on what the slider was set at. I would have said no straight away--it didn't do that in FS2002. In FS2002 leftover resources simply went to keeping the sim smooth. In FS2004, my experience with the textures blurring over time may have been the sim trying to adjust detail to accomodate those times when my fps fell below 25. But I don't know for certain, and I am certainly happy with the result I get now.-John

I've done a lot of testing with this and the bottom line it depends on your hardware and personal settings. Because of that it's impossible to give any hard and fast rules about the "best" setting, that's something you can only find for yourself. I can tell you that on less powerful hardware, frame limiting can be the key to smooth performance. On faster machines it might not be as critical but I've still seen minor improvements with a reasonable setting. I keep mine locked at 28 FPS and that seems a good setting for most types of flying, except military or acrobatics.TonyDigital-flight.com

When posting replies to threads like this, so many folk declare their preferred FPS without any mention of their hardware setup. I would suggest, therefore that such statements are relatively meaningless to the community.May I propose that a good starting point (since there are soooo many variables in this particular equation) would be to state your current locked setting (if locked) with a note of your current hardware, dx version, graphic and audio driver versions and operating system.I will start by saying I have now settled for a lock of 25fps. Hitherto I had had it set at 20 but eventually realised I was missing out on a smoother experience once at altitude. The fly-by using Active Camera is also much more fluid.P4 2.4GHz (400FSB), 1Gig PC2100 DDR Crucial, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB (Omega 2.5.36b), SB Audigy (5.12.0001.0443), Hyundai ImageQuest Q17 17" Monitor (1280x1024x32), Gigabyte GA-8IRXP MoBo, Ultra-Quiet PSU 400W, WinXP Home (SP1), DirectX 9.0b, AGP Aperture = 128MBMike

"Does the framerate slider not control the dynamic scaling of scenery detail?."No. It's a control for the "max" allowed framerate, not for the minimum allowed framerate. It's refered to as "UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT" in fs9.cfg. Interestingly, there's another line, called "LOD_TARGET_FPS", which is set to 24 on my system. I don't think it has any effect though.I find that with certain aircraft/water/cloud combination, a setting of Unlimited causes very big fluctuations in the framerate. In that case I need to limit the framerate to anything from 30 to 60 FPS to smooth things out.If you don't experience those problems, it's perfectly OK to set it to Unlimited. When using photographic sceneries, it must be set to Unlimited, or at least locked to a very high setting such as 40-60 FPS, otherwise scenery textures will look blurred as FS9 loads them on a per-frame basis (the higher your framerate, the faster they'll load).

When I set my framerate slider to unlimited, I notice that the throttle (with autopilot on and IAS speed set) on the Lear45 oscillates noticably trying to hold speed. It doesn't oscillate noticably when I set the framerate to a value of 25-30 fps.Dell 8250:ATI Radeon 9700 PRO 128MbCPU 3.06 with Hyperthreading1024Mb Ram