Many people question, "How can I squeeze just a few more frames out of my system in FS2000 without losing too much image quality?" If you're like me, you want the best quality you can get and still have an acceptable frame rate. I find if you can get the frame rate to around 8 fps, that is all you need. If you find you're having bad image quality but a really high frame rate, add a little more detail. If you find you have great image quality but a low frame rate (below 6 fps), lower the quality a bit. I find that if you follow a few steps you can balance your system to give excellent image quality and frame rates at the same time.

Here are some suggestions (all made from a 200 Pentium MMX, 64MB RAM, VooDoo3 2000 video accelerator (143MHz clock), Win 98).

The Best Ways To Improve Frame Rate:

1. Increase Your Cache Size: If you have the room on your disk USE IT! Increasing the default cache size of 50 MB to 500 MB may offer you up to 3 extra fps. (you can find this in Scenery/Scenery Database.../).

2. If You Don't Have A Video Accelerator Card, Get One: I was running FS on a 2D ATI Rage II+ card and performance was terrible. I would get lucky with 3 fps. Recommendations are TNT cards or Voodoo3+ cards. Just about any card will do but try to get one with at least 8MB RAM. This may give you an extra 4-20 fps extra depending on the card.

3. Avoid High Tech Fancy Dancy Panels: They eat frames like no other. Try to keep it simple and you may regain lost frames. The Artificial horizon indicator eats a lot.

4. Run Scan Disk And Defragmentor Before Installation: I know, I know, you already installed FS2000 on your system, well...take into consideration of doing this next time you reinstall. This is not a big whoop, may only improve performance up to about half a frame.

5. Go To Full Screen Mode: You may gain as much as 20 fps just by switching to full screen, but as I have said before, the number of frames will vary from machine to machine.

6. Use 16 Bit Mode Instead Of 32 Bit: This will increase performance A LOT! Maybe as much as 30 frames! The truth is most people don't notice the difference between the 2 modes and you still can get a great frame rate.

7. Shrink The Window Size: Yep it may sound goofy having this big panel with this little box to see out of but hey, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Maybe an increased rate of only 3 frames but it's better than nothing.

8. Change The Display Quality Settings: When in doubt, change the slider to default 5, and remove the dynamic scenery. Try it--if it runs fast but seems like low quality to you move up the slider bars a touch. Remember try to aim for 8 fps. If you have a really low frame rate move the sliders down a touch (especially the Terrain Mesh Complexity). I found these setting work well on my machine:

Texture Quality: 2
Terrain Mesh: 40
Texture detail distance: 30
Land Class: Normal
Max. Unlimited Vis: 60mi
_Aircraft Shadows
_Ground scenery shadows
X Dawn/Dusk Texture Smoothing
X Smooth Transition View
X Image Smoothing
X Terrain Transitions
_ Dynamic Scenery
Scenery complexity: Normal

9. Exit All Programs Running In The Background: Extra frames depends on how many extra programs are running.

10. Use A Lower Resolution: If you have to go for 640x480x16, do it. My system is set to 1600x1200x16.

In conclusion, I encourage you to try some of these techniques and see what happens. Remember you can almost always set the program back up the way you had it to begin with if needed. Remember to shoot for 8 fps. Good luck to you!

Marc Daniels
celesguy@planetarymotion.net