14 hours ago, Sunshine13 said:

First of all I have been simming since 1998.Being a film major in college I always learned that simming is a different beast than other games on the market.  First person shooter, racing games and so on, yes then we are looking for max frames  Just to make it simple an old theory has been just lock your frames at 30 and you wiill get decent performance

Concluding look at my specs, not the greatest but decent, Yes, I do lock  my frames at 30, and you know what, I have no stuterring, and good performance. Happy camper

The only figure for FPS that I have always tried to get and maintain, is 30 FPS.  With that figure, I have great control of the aircraft, from lift off, to 'kissing the numbers'.  I have also noticed that indeed,  if you can get (Gawd bless you, if you can!), 40/50/60 sustained (for the most part) FPS,  where I see that...my friend can...is that you see a more life-like visual effect of air currents/wind acting upon the aircraft at cruise, and also upon Approach. Other than that...if you can keep/get 30 FPS,  in any sim...(my 64 cents...) you are good to go.  But...having typed that...yes...there is a (small benefit factor) to visuals, such as I have given an example...the visual effect of loft, upon the wing(s), with higher sustained FPS over 30 as a baseline to compare.

Edited May 14, 20224 yr by Sesquashtoo

Its not about chasing or not chasing FPS its about the experience and enjoyment. For me personally anything below 47 FPS is simply BAD ! It feels BAD. 

but the issue with MSFS is not really keeping this number its about the way its going from 40 or 50 fps to a sudden halts (stutters)  when panning and on the ground or low altitude. It used to be good before even with LOD 400 and now anything above 150 will give you these CPU stutters. 

I run in 30fps high/ultra settings. I have 5900x/ 3800mghz 32gb ram / 3080.   The best decision I made was capping at 30FPS. yea panning u can tell because its a bit slower then at 45-60 fps but flying wise its silky smooth and 0 stutters ever. Big airports not even a hickup in SU9.  For me holy grail level stability /smoothness /quality has been achieved. Of course 60FPS would be better but that just comes with so many headaches and constant tweaking. not worth it w current hardware. 

Edited May 14, 20224 yr by wiler

It's not the framecount that matters. It's the stability of FPS that matters most. You can lock your FPS to 30 but won't have a smooth sim if you have FPS dip to 27 or so every once in a while. 

15 hours ago, Sunshine13 said:

First of all I have been simming since 1998.Being a film major in college I always learned that simming is a different beast than other games on the market.  First person shooter, racing games and so on, yes then we are looking for max frames  Just to make it simple an old theory has been just lock your frames at 30 and you wiill get decent performance

Concluding look at my specs, not the greatest but decent, Yes, I do lock  my frames at 30, and you know what, I have no stuterring, and good performance. Happy camper

I’m going to take the contrary position and say frame rates are actually very important in flight sim. High frames rates - as long as they are consistent - are a big part of achieving smoothness, which is part of the verisimilitude needed to truly replicate flight.

However, it seems to me that there are a large number of old-school Avsimmers who hold “FRAMES RATES ARE NOT IMPORTANT” to be part of their religion. Perhaps because of the trauma of having to accept 6 FPS from FSX on release, they want to believe that this is normal. 🙂

There have been many infamous discussions of this here over the years, often remarked on in other corners of the internet (Reddit likes to laugh at Avsim for its belief that ‘humans can’t see more than 12 fps’, or whatever madness is being claimed in a particular thread).

If you fly Aerofly FS2 locked at 120mor even 240 FPS it’s really smooth. Very different to the rather poor frame rates we’ve got used to with FSX/MSFS.

It seems that a number of (predominantly older) simmers have become used to very low frame rates, are happy with this, and don’t know why the kids want better performance. 

What I want is smoothness. It is really, really important to me. I suspect that those who are happy with snail-type frame rates sim in a particular, old-school fashion that involves staring at the screen straight ahead. 

However, once you try and implement more modern visual solutions, 30 FPS is pretty dire. Try Track IR - not great. But even more importantly, VR. I have not simmed without a VR headset on since 2017. It is truly the most immersive thing that has ever happened to flight simulation. It is amazing. But it also takes a very high number of frames per second to be truly smooth. I would like 120-150 FPS in flat screen mode so that I can match the refresh rate of my headset in VR.

Even if you insist on simming in 2D like it’s still 2012, you would still want enough frames to match the refresh rate of your monitor in an ideal world.

If you don’t want this, you don’t really care about smoothness. And given that real flight is smooth and free from stutters, my question is - why?

So please, if you do not want those extra frames, give them to me. I need all the frames per second that I can get!

🙂

 

This will always require a compromise between the desired visual fidelity and perception of smoothness, and that’s why we need options. I resent MS that they removed the superb weather simulation at SU7. Now I have a smooth experience but it should not be possible to run the title at 4k (factor 80) and all settings on High and still achieve 30 FPS on a 5 years old i5 and a 2070.

Edited May 14, 20224 yr by Mark1616

Stutters aren't the same as framerate.  Sims like FSX always had those "micro-stutters" that no matter what your fps, it wasn't smooth.  The fps number didn't matter in FSX because it was never smooth.  (I could never for the life of me get that sim running smooth). 

I played 2020 at 30 fps on my old PC and it was fine, but now I get 60+ on my new PC not running on max, and it feels way better (I'm only flying GA type stuff, no complex airliners).  Is 30 flyable and enjoyable?  Yep.  50-60 just feels a lot better, considering the type of aircraft I'm flying.  Honestly I abandoned FSX a long time ago and converted to Xplane and I finally got to experience good fps so now I'm used to it.  There's just nothing quite like flying a pattern in a light GA plane at high fps. 

That's why there are so many graphic option sliders, everyone can find their balance. 

Im Mostly concerned about Stutters.

I sometimes get stutters for half a second if panning around on a busy airport or when landing on a busy airport (but much less then stutters when panning the camera fast on the ground).

FPS i actually keep locked at 30-60 with the AMD drivers because honestly  when on cruise flight i dont see the need for more then stable 30 FPS. 60 FPS will just produce more heat and i dont notice any difference.

I play WQHD and Ultra.

FPS is like money. Wealthy people don't think about it. But when you can't pay rent, you worry!

Just now, odourboy said:

FPS is like money. Wealthy people don't think about it. But when you can't pay rent, you worry!

Ermmm? You lost me, can’t see the correlation. 

5 minutes ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

Ermmm? You lost me, can’t see the correlation. 

I guess you're one of those with wealth. Congrats!

I don't usually worry about fps as long as it is smooth, usually. I did want to check how things are now after enabling Super Res with my 6800XT/5800X3D combo. MSFS is set to 1920x1080 but AMD SR upscales that to 2560x1440, running all Ultra. Did a flight from the Southern coast of England up to Heathrow with fps in the 60's and it dropped to 34 on the ground at Heathrow. FPS test is now done and Dev Mode turned OFF. I will no longer worry about FPS.

 

5 hours ago, wiler said:

I run in 30fps high/ultra settings. I have 5900x/ 3800mghz 32gb ram / 3080.   The best decision I made was capping at 30FPS. yea panning u can tell because its a bit slower then at 45-60 fps but flying wise its silky smooth and 0 stutters ever. Big airports not even a hickup in SU9.  For me holy grail level stability /smoothness /quality has been achieved. Of course 60FPS would be better but that just comes with so many headaches and constant tweaking. not worth it w current hardware. 

 

Also, capping at 30 FPS produces less heat, your GPU consumes less energy and the fans are less noisy. With AMD drivers you can also set a range like 30-60 FPS and the drivers determine how much is needed. So if you look out of the window straight at 10000 feet MSL you get 30 FPS and when panning around on the ground at the gate you get up to 60 FPS.

16 hours ago, Roy Warren said:

Most movies are recorded at 24 FPS.

This has become like an internet meme now. EACH time, on every forum, of every game, when fps are discussed, it doesn't take long before somebody will post the "movies are shot at 24 fps" mantra.

You just can't compare movies with real-time PC graphic, they are many key differences which, in the end, all means those 24 fps will not fell the same in a movie or a PC game, let's see:

- The famous "cinematic look" is achieved with a very specific combination of frame rate AND shutter speed. The most common setting, by far, is what is called a 180 degree shutter angle, that is the shutter opened for half time, that is 1/48 of a second. Film industry found this resulted in a good compromise between a too blurred image ( shutter completely opened for the whole 1/24th of a second ), or a *stuttery* image, with smaller angles, meaning a faster shutter speed, like a 1/100th or a 1/250th of a second. Sometimes the DP wanted to achieve this effect, but that's not very common. This without even considering that, if you are seeing a movie on analog film on a real projector, the projection system will insert black frames at 1/48s intervals to balance the black frame caused every 1/24s caused by the film advancing system, so you'd get nicely spaced black frame every 1/48s, which are less noticeable AND they match the shutter speed the file was shot with, so you are not "losing" any information. If you seeing the movie on DVD, the player will convert it to 60fps inserting frames, unless you use a Blu-ray player, configured to output 24p with a TV that supports it.

So, shutter speed is the first difference. Shutter speed in PC-generate graphic is "infinitely" short, that is each image is "discrete", so it will never feel as smooth as a move shot at 24 with a shutter speed of 1/48, the most common case by far.

Some interesting explanation here on Red's site:

https://www.red.com/red-101/shutter-angle-tutorial#:~:text=By far the most common,a second at 24 fps.

"But my game has ***motion blur***" effect". Well, yes, motion blur might help to simulate a movie, but it's an effect that cannot compare to reality. In a movie, each frame includes a all the information of that 1/48 slice of reality, with each object containing a variable amount of blur ( or even none, if it was steady ) which was the result of the object own motion combined with the eventual camera motion. Motion blur in games is the result of an estimate mostly based on the previous frames and it's mostly related to the camera motion. It looks fake, because it is.

- Absolute fps steadiness. Frames in a movie shot at 24 fps are all spaced apart by exactly 41.6 ms. Nothing can change that, no background processes, no threads, no OS workload, no bus arbitration, nothing can change the absolute steadiness of each and every frame spaced 41.6 ms from each other. Even a game capped a 24 or 30 fps WILL have some micro-stutters sometimes, and this assuming the best possible conditions of a monitor that sync down to that frequency. G-Sync/Freesync/VRS etc are all good, because you can at least fix the screen tearing resulted by trying to draw an image when the previous one was still drawing, but something that runs at 32 fps for a while, then goes to 38, then goes back to 29, and it's doing continuously, might be tearing-free, but it won't feel as smooth at something that is completely locked at 24 fps for hours, with that natural motion blur.

- Passive vs interactive. When you see a movie, you are NOT interacting with anything. In a PC game, you are controlling something and interact with something else, and the game must first process your input. There's USB lag ( or worse with wireless ), there's PC monitor lag and this is added to the time it took for the game (after it read your input) to decide what to do in response to what you asked to do. If the game runs at 24 fps, it's more likely to be in unfortunate situations like you pressing a button just before a new frame rate was created, you might have to wait at least another 41.6 ms to see the effect of what you did. If the game ran at 60 fps, the wait time would have been only 16.67ms, meaning you will "feel" closer to the action. So, even if you think you are not "seeing" much difference between 30 and 60 fps, the game will FEEL better. This won't be an issue when watching a movie, but it is when interacting with something.

But if you don't believe the technical data, why you don't just trust your own eyes ?

Now, not *everybody* is sensitive to frame rate in the same way. There's a somewhat "general" agreement in the scientific community that, for most people, having more than 60 fps is probably overkill, but every person is different.

I'm a bit fixated with fps, to the point I just don't care so much lowering quality, to get more fps. Those of you which are into Home Cinema might remember the issue with the in-famous "Rainbow Effect" with DLP Projectors. People were making a big fuss about it, so the first time I went to see one in action, I was shocked by two things: how much better the quality/contrast was against the usual LCD projectors, and how IMPOSSIBLE for me was to watch a movie on a DLP, because I was just too distracted by the rainbow effect. I couldn't simply watch the movie anymore, because each time I blinked, I saw that streak of colors. Regardless how clearly better DLP was in general, I just couldn't think getting one, so I ended up buying a regular LCD proj, which didn't had the same beautiful colors and deep blacks, but at least I could watch the movie, instead of the rainbow.

But that's not the main thing. My father is also very much into Home Cinema, and when we went to shops/exhibits together, to check all the new stuff that came out, he was NEVER, ever, able to see the rainbow! Regardless how hard he tried, he never saw the DLP Rainbow effect, and lucky him, so he could buy a nice DLP.

I think it's *possible* those people that can't see the DLP rainbow effect might be the same ones that won't see much difference between 24, 30 or 60 fps.

For me, 30 vs 60 fps is like NIGHT AND DAY, but I can understand how not everybody might feel the same.

Also, we can see in a game like Flight Simulator, where the action is somewhat more relaxed than, let's say, a competitive driving game, having a good locked 30 fps is more than enough, which is surely true, but that's quite difference than saying there's "no difference", and surely not "because movies are shot at 24 fps"...

Edited May 14, 20224 yr by virtuali

I suspect that the reason why "old school" simmers have accepted 30fps for so long is because they want the maximum "bang for their buck". They can run the simulator at higher detail settings when compared to 60fps, and they have less chance of experiencing annoying stutters. Obviously, 60fps will feel smoother than 30fps, but it is the framerate that is considered to be good enough that counts.

Edited May 14, 20224 yr by Christopher Low