I have posted this in a couple of places but in both places it is buried deep in a thread. I have been asked to start a new thead about this. When I first fired up FSX I was disappointed by my frame rate. My PC is an Athlon XP 3200+, 1.5 Gig ram, and an ATI 9800 Pro 128mb. While not the fastest PC it certainly has been able to play everything I've thrown at it. Imagine my disappointment to see 15 FPS and less. The strange thing I noticed was that while the FPS was low it didn't feel that low. In any other game that I have been at 15 it is tremendously jerky and just not enjoyable at all. I have always purchased yesterday's fast pc so that I get decent performance without spending a lot of money. I can imagine some people that have paid quite a premium for the latest and greatest hardware and then were tremendously disappointed by the FPS displayed by FSX. Well maybe I have good news for you.I've attached two screen shots.Attachment #1 is an FS9 screen shot showing the reported FS9 FPS (50.3) and in the upper corner is the actual DirectX FPS (54).Attachment #2 is an FSX screen shot showing the reported FSX FPS (16.2) and in the upper corner is the actual DirectX FPS (30).So FSX is reporting a lower FPS then you are actually getting. So don't hit ctrl-z and just enjoy the experience. Or double your FPS for comparison to FS9.The frame rate in the upper right corner is being displayed by ATI Tray Tools.Bruce

I'm experiencing the same that you're reporting (using ATI tray tool FPS on screen display), though I don't see as much of a difference, just maybe 2-3 FPS. May that depend on how often the FPS are sampled (it's a configurable parameter in ATI tray tools)?More importantly though, while the frame rate counter indication may appear somewhat low (after tweaking I get 20/25 in rural areas and 13/15 in heavily bulit up areas), I _feel_ the sim "looks smoother" in FSX than it did in FS9.Pietro.

My ATI Tray Tools is set to whatever it defaults to when you install it. I installed it to do this comparison. The ATI FPS counter appears to respond just as fequently as the ctrl-z FPS counter. If I lock the frame rate in FS9 at 20 the ATI counter will stay at 20. If I lock FSX at 10 the ATI counter will stay at 20.I'm curious if this is a driver issue, card issue or FSX issue. I have the latest ATI driver as of last week. I'm not at my system so I can't look up the version. I have an ATI packaged ATI 9800 Pro.My experience so far is that FSX feels like the ATI counter and not the ctrl-z counter.Bruce

ATI radeon X800XT with latest Catalyst 6.9 here.Must check this evening, I had FPS capped at 25, maybe that's why I'm not seeing that big a difference. Agreed it looks better than the FSX FPS counter shows though.Pietro.

Radeon X800 GTO here with the latest Omega drivers (3.8.273), based on the Catalyst 6.9 drivers.ATI Tray Tools reports the same FPS as FSX does for me. I agree this does sound like a driver issue to me if you see a difference.

No difference at all here either, using an Nvidia 6600GT card. Sounds like the tool is mis-reporting.Allcott

This may be totally the product of a faulty memory.But I seem to remember being told in FS2004 that the frame rate counter displayed the HIGHEST MOMENTARY level of FPS attained during the sample interval.Many people had asked MS over the past couple years to change the FPS counter to display the AVERAGE FPS level over the sample interval.Could they have done that?

Hi All:I haven't studied up on this in detail yet, but I was wondering if this could have anything to do with that elsewhere reported "dual tracing of frames" supposedly used when certain new FSX features are active (ex: bloom etc.).Could this explain a halving of frame rates if FSX was trying to be "honest" about 'unique' frames generated after rendering and dual processing each frame before writing the screen?Just thought I'd share a half-awake idea on this before I had some caffeine this A.M. (no flames needed, thank you... too early in the day!)Cheers!:-) GaryGB

I did some more testing and no matter what I do the FSX FPS is always about half of what the ATI Tray Tools is displaying. At this point I believe the ATI Tray Tools display and do not believe what FSX is displaying. I am now going to see what fraps says. I experimented by setting all sliders to the left. I figured that maybe my card was keeping up and at some point it was taking two frames to draw everything. It doesn't matter what I set it to, I get the same results. My low is FSX showing 16 FPS and my high is FSX showing 41 with everything turned off. When I do that the DirectX fps is 80.My ATI driver is 8.291.0.0. I do not have catalyst installed.I noticed above that I kept saying ctrl-z when I meant shift-z, but this forum won't let me edit it.Bruce

...the FSX framerate counter is correct. ATI Tool is reporting a doubled framerate in full-screen mode. Switch it back to windowed mode and the two counters agree precisely. Or, try it with FRAPS which also will agree with the FSX counter.Doug

I tried it with Fraps and get the same result. When I switched to windowed mode the Fraps display then agrees with the FSX frame rate, but it also then feels like that frame rate. When I play in full screen mode and I'm getting the 16 FSX and 30 Fraps it feels like 30.Fraps and ATI Tray Tools are displaying the true frame rate (ie how many times the screen is getting updated). In window mode they are the same because the window is detached from your screen and there is no need to switch to the next frame until you are actually finished drawing the screen. It looks to me like in full screen mode FSX is taking longer than a frame to generate the full display. The movement of the plane seems to be running at the Fraps/ATI frame rate and it doesn't really matter if it takes longer than a frame to draw all the other stuff. It just isn't noticeable to me. It must be drawing stuff that I don't really see. 10 FSX FPS/10 Fraps in windowed mode is almost unplayable to me, but 10 FSX FPS/20 Fraps in full screen mode is smooth as silk. There is no comparison between the two. Which brings me to the conclusion that both are correct and you really can't use the FSX counter to compare to FS9.Bruce

Well, I just learned something. FRAPS does, indeed, suffer from the doubled framerate problem with FSX (but not with FS9). Somewhere there is a reference to this issue with ATI cards/drivers - I just can't find it. The "double FPS problem" has shown up with other games besides FSX. I'll post the reference if I ever find it again. In the mean time, I'll trust the FSX counter.Doug

>>Many people had asked MS over the past couple years to change>the FPS counter to display the AVERAGE FPS level over the>sample interval.>>Could they have done that?You can do that,it's an FSX.CFG entry......I think we're talking about the same thing...displaying average fps in the shift-z display...RhettAMD 3700+ (@2.5 ghz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (94.47), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8, WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian

Bruce, No disrespect or anything else negative intended, but your system has something weird going on. I tried FRAPS and ATI tray tools counters and in both sims, what they show is what the sim shows. Im not getting why folks are thinking that FSX is "smoother" at low frame rates. Ive seen this before with a few other sims, its all about individual perception but the frame rate counter doesn't lie. Some folks are happy with 12-15 and others, like me, dont like to fly unless it can achieve a fairly stutter free 25 or better. If this sim goes towards 15 it sure feels like 15 for me. Its flyable, but barely. There are issues with autogen popping, and some minor blurry occasions, which are apparently causing some micro stutters for me. Its obviuosly system related and even with the tweaks for autogen and textures I still see unnaceptable frame rates at times. I would submit to anyone reading this that below @15fps your not going to have an enjoyable flight. You can tell me all day how much smoother FSX is at 15fps and I'll just smile and let you enjoy your smooth 15fps. If you are having a good time, thats all that counts.Hornit

Do ATI Tools and the sim agree when running fullscreen? If so, which drivers are you using? I can't get them to agree in fullscreen mode no matter what I do.Doug