Frames per second -- the discussion

[creator2003]

I see your point with new engines and so on but we have what we have for a sim ,the sim can display 24.000 airports in there rw locations ,it also displays that main towns and citys meshes elevations third party custom addons / high details VC panels/planes ,add AI planes cars boats ,
some ai model planes have the same amount of ploys as a avatar running around 50km sq or the people walking by you down the streets etc, its all based around what the developers want you to see , they have that thing in games and in the sims "LODs" so what you are seeing at range is not what you see up close ,its a disassemble poly that could be just a silhouette 1 plane at 1000 feet then closer you have a fully 3d model etc ,i dont know of many games that you can click buttons knobs levers in every vehicle you hop into ,nether have i seen realworld data installed in minutes and rendered off as clouds ,the sim in alot of ways is worlds ahead of other engines even at 4 years old +26 years of sim before it ,

why flps dont matter to me in the sim , i can always change that with hardware upgrades ,addons etc and it s shelf life is far beyond your top sellers at the moment/ever because the platform/engine has a never ending life of possible out comes ,some other sim/games that have come close ARMA1-2 ,R factor both are flp heavy

[s0cks]

I'm not a games developer, I can only compare it to what other games I have. While I haven't tried FlightGear, I do own X-Plane and I can safely say that X-Plane can render the same level of autogen, and water quality at a better framerate. And its obviously a graphical issue as the biggest framerate hit comes from autogen, water, and clouds (for some). AI has a hit too, but I'm not sure whether AI aircraft are calculated to the same detail as the players aircraft. I'm guessing no... but could someone clarify?

Anyway, I'm kind of getting a bit lost as to what points we are discussing now.

[NZ255]

Why do you call them flps Mike? What does the 'l' stand for?

Always bugged me

[pilot.masman]

dunno when xplane was coded but its bound to have been a little more recent than fsx therefore coded using more modern hardware (or atleast, for more modern hardware). BTW cod5 is a fairly low spec game... i had a p4 2.4ghz running it the other day on 512mb ram, ran at 20fps fine. same with valve games, and the unreal games, all arent built to be simulators of real life.

just cause 2 was a strange one for me, i can never get into a game that gives blindingly fast FPS at full settings (and crash every half hour) and low fps at minimum.

havent tried FSX just yet on my new machine and i dont think i would mind if it is lower fps for two reasons, 1 i can just live with lower fps for awesome looking gameplay or 2 i can turn down the settings slightly and still have an awesome looking game

[toprob]

QUOTE

'l' stand for?[/quote]
More in my head as i say it "flips" ie to me as it flips through frames per second, just me ,ill try to correct myself next time ..lol

Last edited by creator2003 on Tue May 11, 2010 5:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[markll]

QUOTE (s0cks @ May 11 2010, 01:04 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Not sure how I am wrong, as you so eloquently put it, 15fps, is 15fps. It doesn't matter how much more calculations are going on in the background, what you see is what you get.

Ok, look, I could explain it to you in person, but clearly something is being lost in translation perhaps due to the disconnected conversation style of an online forum. Just trust me, READ (of inputs, etc) and UPDATE (of position, engine variables and other data) is done on a different schedule from RENDER (aka DRAW). And that difference is taken into account in the engine, since potentially the time difference between the UPDATE and the next RENDER is variable. This means that input, positional and flight dynamics calculations can actually be smooth down well below what you might consider "smooth animation" levels (say for the sake of argument, 25 fps). So, while perhaps at 15 fps, it looks a bit jerky, the simulator is actually still responding fairly smothly to your inputs, calculated environmental conditions, etc.

I could go on for hours about this stuff, but as I said, it seems that somehow the message isn't translating properly via the forum, so I'll stop there.

QUOTE (s0cks @ May 11 2010, 01:04 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

But anyway, I never said that I couldn't run FSX well. With close to default (only NZ 20m mesh and topo), I get 25-50fps over Auckland City with most sliders cranked (FTX is another story), I'm just trying to make the point that the game is badly optimized, and those hoping to run FSX with a decent amount of eye candy on mid-range systems need to be warned, otherwsie they are in for a shock. What I am running is:

Quad Core Q6600 @ 3.0GHz
4GB DDR2-800
nVidia GTX275 896MB
Windows 7 Professional 64bit

Ok, so for the record, as I said, I've got a mid-range (but still modern) PC and it performs quite acceptably. I have all sliders maxed out, and I'm running at native res for my monitor, which is 1440x900. Sitting on the apron at Rob's freeware godzone NZPP in the RealAir Spitfire 2008, with 32 bit textures enabled, I get 30-40 fps. Flying sees my fps drop somewhat, averages mid 20s in flight though, for example Real NZ Wellington will drop the framerate down well below that - mid teens or thereabouts.

So, yeah, people's mileage will vary, but I think most people realise that when they buy FSX. I do accept your earlier point about add on developers showcasing the highest detail they can in their screenshots without actually letting their customers know that the product they're looking at will most likely not run well with that much detail on their system.

But I'm not sure we can blame FSX for that, nor can we say "oh the engine is poorly optimised" because the ACES team didn't/couldn't anticipate the direction that future PC tech was going to take. It is what it is, you know? Unfortunately (fortunately?? you be the judge) FSX can be extended with add-ons that tax it's core engine beyond what was expected at the time it was written.

[Bazza]

World-wide, I wonder how many thousands (hundreds of thousands ?) of copies of FSX have been bought, either by people who thought they'd try it, or by others as presents for them,
and are now in the "dump" pile for the many and varied reasons discussed in this thread...?

I still run and enjoy FS9 because I have a massive New Zealand (thanks to Lawrie and others here.)

I have FSX and fiddle with it. I get modest frame rates, I go and make a coffee while it loads.

I am still an aircraft fan, the number of street-lights per acre, or the quality of the rendered baggage loading trolleys isn't that important to me.

I would hate to have bought and installed FSX without the benefit of about 10 years learning, tweaking, forum bashing and general homework.

I wonder at times whether our hobby is headed towards some sort of scenery sim, where the aircraft become a means of looking down on the
latest brilliant development..?

[pilot.masman]

QUOTE (Bazza @ May 11 2010, 07:47 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I wonder at times whether our hobby is headed towards some sort of scenery sim, where the aircraft become a means of looking down on the
latest brilliant development..?

have to agree with you mostly but truly a great aircraft is ok but if your flying through blocks that were meant to be trees i think its slightly spoiled. i think we might as well sit parked up in the hangar looking at the craft rather than go flying if scenery wasnt a big part of simming

[markll]

QUOTE (Bazza @ May 11 2010, 07:47 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

World-wide, I wonder how many thousands (hundreds of thousands ?) of copies of FSX have been bought,

Yeah, you have to wonder a? Apparently so many copies of FSX have been sold that they completely used up every possible product key that FSX and their activation servers could handle. Yet the demand is still so high that they have gone into a new production run, with a new set of product keys. Presumably many of those dissatisifed with FSX have/are selling their copy on to someone else, yet there is still sufficient demand from people to warrant Microsoft generating a new set of product keys, and running a whole new batch of them out.

Kinda makes the decision to sack the entire ACES team look even more stupid doesn't it?

QUOTE (Bazza @ May 11 2010, 07:47 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I am still an aircraft fan, the number of street-lights per acre, or the quality of the rendered baggage loading trolleys isn't that important to me.

Ditto - I think thats why we're all in this hobby...the fact is that we LOVE aircraft, and flight. However, a big part of flight is the realism of the world you're flying IN, and clearly any sim developer has to consider that. Whether you think they went too far (seriously - WHALES????) or not, there can be no argument that FSX simulates the world and it's contents to an level that is unmatched (and no, Just Cause 2 doesn't count, as it doesn't SIMULATE anything, despite arguably having a massively busy world) to this day, some 3 1/2 - 4 years after it was released.

[s0cks]

A level that is unmatched because MSFS did and still does have a huge following. It is extremely hard for other flight sims to get their foot in the door. And this isn't because MSFS is the best, its just that it had the biggest budget, marketing, history, and therefore following. It's 3rd party developers that make this game.

I still stick to the point that the game is poorly optimized. It runs better on a 4GHz Dual Core than a 3GHz Quad Core. It's no secret that clock speed is the answer to a better FSX experience. And lets not forget that dual cores had been around for at least a year before FSX was released - yet it was released with no multicore support.

I just spent last night following NickN's tweaking guide. I managed to get FSX running very smoothly, but I'm astonished that I must delve into the likes of the buffer pools, texture bandwidth settings, LOD clamps, triple buffering vsync, etc... to be able to have a smooth and enjoyable experience. Out of the box I get stutters, screen tearing, texture flashing, and a generally unacceptable experience - even with high FPS.

Don't mistake our only choice (within reason) as being a good choice.

[markll]

QUOTE (s0cks @ May 13 2010, 04:12 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It's 3rd party developers that make this game.

It sure is. And to be fair, that was the intention of the development team all along. They knew damn well that they could only do so much themselves, and so they tool the view that they should do their best to develop an engine, a platform if you will, upon which the third party developers could build, and really shine.

Did they go too far, and perhaps sacrifice perfect optimisation (out of the box) for the sake of that goal? Maybe they did...

QUOTE (s0cks @ May 13 2010, 04:12 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I still stick to the point that the game is poorly optimized. It runs better on a 4GHz Dual Core than a 3GHz Quad Core. It's no secret that clock speed is the answer to a better FSX experience. And lets not forget that dual cores had been around for at least a year before FSX was released - yet it was released with no multicore support.

Actually, the first commercially available dual core chips started hitting the market during early 2006, the year FSX was released. FSX hit shelves in October 2006. As a software developer myself, I can tell you that developing software for concurrent processing is a very different kettle of fish to more traditional non-threaded programming. Now Aces wouldn't have known exactly when dual core chips would hit the market till very late in their development cycle (remember that FSX was in development for some 3 years or so). By the time they would have been able to get hold of enough pre-production information to retool their engine properly for multicore solutions, it would have been a mammoth effort to refactor everything, with the likely result that they'd miss their deadline (to release well before christmas 2006). Add to that the fact that even though dual core CPUs had hit the market, they really weren't common in mid- and entry-level PCs for another 18 months at least, and its easy to see why they went the way they did. Consider also that they did not build in any support for DirectX 10, which was also just around the corner during the later stages of FSX development lifecycle.

QUOTE (s0cks @ May 13 2010, 04:12 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I just spent last night following NickN's tweaking guide. I managed to get FSX running very smoothly, but I'm astonished that I must delve into the likes of the buffer pools, texture bandwidth settings, LOD clamps, triple buffering vsync, etc... to be able to have a smooth and enjoyable experience. Out of the box I get stutters, screen tearing, texture flashing, and a generally unacceptable experience - even with high FPS.

And here we get to the real point. So, Aces build a system that is highly extensible, but perhaps not fully optimised as well as it could be. In lieu of attempting to crystal ball gaze for a glimpse of the future, and plan for that, they took as many of the engine's processing variables as possible, and made them tweakable. So in a sense, they optimised for the majority of hardware that was available at the time, and allowed for users to optimise it better for their setups in future by tweaking settings in the config files.

QUOTE (s0cks @ May 13 2010, 04:12 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Don't mistake our only choice (within reason) as being a good choice.

FSX is far from the only choice. Flight Gear, XPlane, combat sims like IL2 and Rise of Flight, to name a few.

[metalnwood]

QUOTE (s0cks @ May 10 2010, 10:44 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I wouldn't start using the "native eye can't see xx FPS", its a very wrong and outdated view. The human eye can see upto around 72fps. Hence why a CRT at 60Hz (60 refreshes a second) can give you a banging headache. With movies and TV you cannot see jerkiness because it is motion capture. Very different. When you record real life, you also record motion blur which tells your brain something is moving fluidly. Some games have basic motion blur, but its nothing near the same.

Any gamer will tell you it is easy to see the difference between 30fps and 60fps (especially with fast action). A good example in FSX is to start panning around an area that gives you 20-30fps, now move the view so your looking top down. Notice the huge increase in pan speed and fluidity? That my friend is 60fps+

Not sure I understand what you mean by motion capture and it being fluid because of that. Motion picture/capture is just an old name for film that wasnt a single frame, it's named that way because it moved. A film that is taken at 24 fps would very rarely have an exposure that totaled 1 second over 24 frames. In daylight, where you may have the chance to see things blur the exposure could be like standard film, say 1/400 of a second so you have 24 very short exposures with little to no blur.

Obviously it depends what you are doing. slowly going around the scenery looking forwards or sideways at 20fps should be ok. Fly it like a fighter and it wont seem so fluid. For me, the biggest performance problem for fsx is trackir. It has brought the very fast panning that makes first person shooters crave a reasonably high fps. I would guess that the guys flying the big jets can live with the lower frame rates more so then some.

On the other note, will it turn in to just a scenery sim. I am not a real pilot but I like flying IFR, having an idea I know how things work will be as close as I get to flying for some time to come. I dont fly the big ones, I have more fun in smaller planes so I like the photo realistic scenery. I don't know if the flight model is good enough or not but there are a lot of choices for aircraft with different instruments, fms,fmc,mcp,radios,g1000, the list goes on. To me, a non pilot the planes seem modeled but flying around dull scenery that doesn't look real makes a big difference.

I am a simulator fan, thats why I play them so I would choose to simulate systems/physics over pretty pictures first. I wouldn't fly something that had no visual appeal though. Having said that, there must have been some reason I played flight sim on the C64

Something that really detracts to the realism for me is having to use a keyboard and mouse while I am flying.. grr.

[s0cks]

markll - The Athlon 64 X2 was released mid-2005. That was the first dual core chip for the consumer. Well over a year before FSX was launched.

metalnwood - It is very easy to see a CRT at 60Hz (60 refreshes a second) flickering - especially in your peripheral vision. Therefore we can deduce that the eye can definitely see at least 60fps. Up the refresh to 72Hz and the flickering is gone (not for all, but most). This is why only games that run over 60fps are considered fluid and seamless. The computer is rendering every frame, and if it can't reach that number (60fps or more) then your eyes will see it as a stutter. That is unless it can produce an artificial blur like you would see in real life, but no games do this yet - some have very basic motion blur when you pan (that is about it).

[toprob]

QUOTE (s0cks @ May 15 2010, 08:19 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

markll - The Athlon 64 X2 was released mid-2005. That was the first dual core chip for the consumer. Well over a year before FSX was launched.

I think you'd find that FSX was in development for a little more than three years. I had the first beta almost a year before the final release. I can remember a lot of discussion about emerging multi-core technology during the beta, and I know that this isn't the sort of thing which can be tacked on as an afterthought. What you've said had been said a lot of times before, mainly before SP1. Repeating over and over that FSX is poorly optimised serves no real purpose.

I've said before -- you are allowed to bad-mouth the FSX developers on this forum, but first you need to produce a better sim:) So far none have taken me up on this.

[markll]

QUOTE (toprob @ May 15 2010, 09:34 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I've said before -- you are allowed to bad-mouth the FSX developers on this forum, but first you need to produce a better sim:) So far none have taken me up on this.

Tempting...I wrote my first sim when I was 11...it ran on a ZX81! (really!)

Who's with me?!

QUOTE (s0cks @ May 15 2010, 08:19 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

markll - The Athlon 64 X2 was released mid-2005. That was the first dual core chip for the consumer. Well over a year before FSX was launched.

OMG - let it go already! "released" does not equal "market saturated to the point where it's worth spending another 12 months rewriting our software to take advantage of it" OK?????????

QUOTE (s0cks @ May 15 2010, 08:19 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

metalnwood - It is very easy to see a CRT at 60Hz (60 refreshes a second) flickering - especially in your peripheral vision. Therefore we can deduce that the eye can definitely see at least 60fps. Up the refresh to 72Hz and the flickering is gone (not for all, but most). This is why only games that run over 60fps are considered fluid and seamless. The computer is rendering every frame, and if it can't reach that number (60fps or more) then your eyes will see it as a stutter. That is unless it can produce an artificial blur like you would see in real life, but no games do this yet - some have very basic motion blur when you pan (that is about it).

Again, 1 rendered frame IS NOT equal to 1 processed frame. You may get your knickers in a twist cos FSX doesn't run at the speed of light, but noone else apparently cares! Its a FLIGHT SIM, not a GAME, so most of us prefer to see the SIMULATION processing given precedence over the eye candy.

[ZK-MAT]

I gave up arguing the world is flat on this topic, BUT I have to jump back in and query the theory (omg a poet) that the 60hz refresh rate of a CRT monitor (as opposed to the very fluid 60hz LCD monitor refresh rate) is the same as a frames per second rate. I didn't think it was, and from Wikipedia:

The refresh rate (most commonly the "vertical refresh rate", "vertical scan rate" for CRTs) is the number of times in a second that display hardware draws the data. This is distinct from the measure of frame rate in that the refresh rate includes the repeated drawing of identical frames, while frame rate measures how often a video source can feed an entire frame of new data to a display. [Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refresh_rate]

Thats all for now

[markll]

QUOTE (ZK-MAT @ May 15 2010, 11:04 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I gave up arguing the world is flat on this topic, BUT I have to jump back in and query the theory (omg a poet) that the 60hz refresh rate of a CRT monitor (as opposed to the very fluid 60hz LCD monitor refresh rate) is the same as a frames per second rate. I didn't think it was, and from Wikipedia:

The refresh rate (most commonly the "vertical refresh rate", "vertical scan rate" for CRTs) is the number of times in a second that display hardware draws the data. This is distinct from the measure of frame rate in that the refresh rate includes the repeated drawing of identical frames, while frame rate measures how often a video source can feed an entire frame of new data to a display. [Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refresh_rate]

Thats all for now

Yeah, I'm giving up now too, as long as I stop seeing whinging about how FSX isn't this, or should do that. As Rob said, if you think you can do better, go ahead and do so. Till then, shut up.

[metalnwood]

QUOTE

metalnwood - It is very easy to see a CRT at 60Hz (60 refreshes a second) flickering - especially in your peripheral vision. Therefore we can deduce that the eye can definitely see at least 60fps. Up the refresh to 72Hz and the flickering is gone (not for all, but most). This is why only games that run over 60fps are considered fluid and seamless. The computer is rendering every frame, and if it can't reach that number (60fps or more) then your eyes will see it as a stutter. That is unless it can produce an artificial blur like you would see in real life, but no games do this yet - some have very basic motion blur when you pan (that is about it).[/quote]

I wasn't saying you can't see the difference, I was saying there is nothing special about film that makes 24 fps seem any different. You also have to be sure that your eyes are not getting confused with this like tearing as you dont usually render the same fps as your refresh rate and that can make typically god FPS look like it's not so good. As I used to play a lot of first person shooter, I agree that higher is better and I would certainly want more then I would be happy with on FSX.

One point I was trying to make is that FSX can get away with less because it's not played like a first person shooter. Sit in the cessna and fly a straight line, the scene changes very little in a second, if I was to break it up in to 24 separate frames there would be so little difference between them it would be hard to pick. A lot of the flying is like that although as I said, adding track IR has shown up slower FPS quite a bit as the panning is a lot faster.

[s0cks]

QUOTE (metalnwood @ May 16 2010, 09:05 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I wasn't saying you can't see the difference, I was saying there is nothing special about film that makes 24 fps seem any different. You also have to be sure that your eyes are not getting confused with this like tearing as you dont usually render the same fps as your refresh rate and that can make typically god FPS look like it's not so good. As I used to play a lot of first person shooter, I agree that higher is better and I would certainly want more then I would be happy with on FSX.

One point I was trying to make is that FSX can get away with less because it's not played like a first person shooter. Sit in the cessna and fly a straight line, the scene changes very little in a second, if I was to break it up in to 24 separate frames there would be so little difference between them it would be hard to pick. A lot of the flying is like that although as I said, adding track IR has shown up slower FPS quite a bit as the panning is a lot faster.

And my point was that there is a difference! Its called motion blur (which doesn't exist in FSX). Anyway, even with slow aircraft I still find 24fps too slow. I can feel the jerkiness when panning. Only 30fps or more seems smooth enough to me. I guess it varies from person to person.

[s0cks]

QUOTE (markll @ May 16 2010, 12:03 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yeah, I'm giving up now too, as long as I stop seeing whinging about how FSX isn't this, or should do that. As Rob said, if you think you can do better, go ahead and do so. Till then, shut up.

Lol. Some people get wound up a bit too easy no? It is just a discussion, and I fully understand what you were saying. And while you think 15fps is smooth, I don't (in fact I can't stand it). I guess that is what it boils down too.

I don't understand why some people get so defensive over FSX. It has its flaws. I believe optimization is one of them. And no I can't write my on flightsim, but others already have, and have shown us how some things work better in FSX and other things don't.

Yes I know 60HZ does not equal 60fps in real terms, but its proof that the eye can see 60 refreshes a second, and almost always you will a see a whole new frame rendered as you are moving.

Anyway, I'm flying FSX now. I've updated my post in the stickied "Tweaks" post above here. Maybe it will help others achieve a smoother framerate.