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How To...Beat The Frame Rate Blues By Robert Seitz Those of us with less than state-of-the-art systems often find FS2000 to be an exercise in frame rate frustration. Let me describe my system: AMD K6-2 CPU, 450 MHz; Voodoo 3 3000 video card (16 megs); 128 megs RAM; 4x CD ROM. Not exactly your "Super-Gamer Special Edition". But I have learned how to live with FS2000 and enjoy it to the max. It is known as "living within your means". Let me share what I have learned. Let's state at the outset that 128 megs of RAM is almost a necessity. While it does not affect frame rates, per se, it makes a huge difference in the amount of file swapping that goes on with the hard drive. The fits and starts that you will experience with, say, 64 megs will drive you mad. I run at a resolution of 1280x1024x16, which produces nearly photographic images, and my frame rate guideline is to stay above 8 fps most of the time, preferably 10 or better, even under dense conditions such as cities, airports, and the like. Let me make clear that I enjoy viewing the aircraft from the outside. I am not a cockpit potato, so to speak. I like to watch the takeoff and the gear retract; I like to review my landings with the instant replay feature, again from outside the aircraft and from various angles. Reducing the resolution, even down to 800x600, has a negligible affect on fps on my system, though that may not be the case on yours. This indicates to me that the video card is doing its job well; it is the CPU that is the bottleneck. First of all, the display settings within the simulator are not nearly as important as the elements that we will review below. (My display settings, for what they are worth, are outlined at the end of the article.) The elements that are of prime importance are the aircraft, clouds, the airport, and to a lesser extent the panel. Let's discuss each of them. Aircraft: Oh, there are some beautiful planes out there! Some are so tempting, only to find yourself in frame rate hell. If I look at the plane parked on the runway, engines off, and get less than 10 fps I blow it away. And 10 is very marginal. I will fly it to see how it behaves, and more often than not get rid of it. A more realistic initial fps is 12, as there is a slight decline in fps when engines start and flying (especially at lower altitudes or amongst clouds) puts even more drag on the system. There are plenty of very handsome aircraft out there that will give you good to excellent frame rates. I see no reason to expose yourself to herky-jerky flying when there is no need to do so. At the bottom of this article I list twelve aircraft of various types that are my favorites. They look good and fly well. Some have night lighting and all that fancy stuff. One of the bugaboos of FS2000 has been the fact that the default aircraft do not produce good frame rates, thus many people become discouraged from their initial exposure and curse the product. (See the comparison at the end of this article.) The question arises, then, is there a way to determine ahead of time whether that aircraft that is so appealing to the eye will pass muster when installed, or will it be a frame rate killer? I am not a designer of aircraft, so I'm sure there are others who might provide a better clue, but what I have found is that the size of the mdl file (in the aircraft's model folder) is generally proportionate to frame rate. The larger the mdl file(s) the slower the frame rate. When viewing the contents of the zip file online I look at the size of the mdl file. Many of them are well over a megabyte, and that is normally a downer. I will continue this discussion at the end of the article when the specific aircraft are shown. Clouds: What a killer these can be! Clouds will slow things down in a hurry. Flying in clear weather is not a sin, but, like many things that are not sinful, it is dull. I like clouds. I like flying among the friendly puffies. I came upon a nice compromise. A chap named Chris Ellis has made available an FS2000 Cloud Pack 3.0 containing two sets of replacement clouds (16 bit and 8 bit). The 20 files of the FS default clouds constitute 3.33 megabytes of data; the 16 bit set of replacement clouds (which I use) is only 855 kilobytes. This means that there is 75 percent less "stuff" to push around to form the clouds you see on the screen. Ergo, much better frame rates. Not only that, but the replacement clouds look good and remain white and vaporous under all conditions, which cannot be said of the default clouds which often become blotchy up close. I find no significant improvement by using the 8 bit set. I set weather to clouds=few (1/8), visibility=30. Also, you will do yourself a favor by using the latest FSUIPC module if you do not already have it installed. Airports: The super-realistic airport is a handsome frill, indeed, but landing at one can give you ulcers. I have one fancy downloaded airport. My home airport, Tampa International, has been nicely modeled and the frame rate drop associated with it is not severe, so I live with it happily. My general rule is to stay with the default airport scenery; it really isn't that bad. To me, a smooth landing is far more satisfying than pretty buildings. Panels: Normally you will have little trouble with panels, but there are some that eat up frame rates surprisingly. Remember, each instrument (gauge) is a little program ticking along in the background, eating up processor time, and some of these add-on gauges may not be too cleverly designed. I recently ran into a panel that looked simple enough, but was sheer madness. I have no idea what was wrong with it, nor did I try to find out, but my frame rates went south in a hurry in the cockpit view. So those are my rules for living in the FS2000 world as a poor but happy man. Now, as promised, I list twelve aircraft that I particularly enjoy. In parenthesis is the fps I experience looking at the plane (spot view) from the outside, engines off, parked on runway 24R at Manchester, UK (default scenery, daytime). This is where the beautiful Aer Lingus 737 sits waiting to be faultlessly piloted by me to Dublin under ATC provided by ProFlight 2000 (so I used it as the benchmark site). Each plane is available on FlightSim.Com, and the file name is indicated. I list them in order of fps, not by my preference as an aircraft. My four favorites are indicated by an asterisk (*). The "N" indicates night lighting. On the far right is the size of the mdl file in thousands of bytes. Aircraft Name Frame Rate File Name MDL Size Cessna Citation X (15.3) * citx_2k.zip 72 Beechcraft G18 (14.1) * twinbc18.zip 101 Comair Bombardier (14.0) * crj5com3.zip N 136 Delta L-1011 (12.9) l1011doc.zip N 136 British Air 747 (12.6) bao7472k.zip N 136 USCG HC-130 (12.6) hc130_2k.zip 136 Aer Lingus 737-500 (12.5) * ein7352k.zip 136 British Air Dash8 (12.5) badash8.exe N 136 UPS 747-100 (12.4) ups74-1.zip N 136 Canadian Air A-320 (12.1) a320-cpl.zip N 136 F-104 Starfighter (11.7) cf104650.zip 136 DC-8 Cargo Lion (11.7) dc862cgl.zip N 136 For comparison, here's a sample of the FS2000 default aircraft. Aircraft Name Frame Rate MDL Size Extra 300 (11.1) 395 Sopwith Camel ( 9.8) 344 Cessna 182R ( 9.7) 483 Cessna 182S ( 9.6) 500 737-400 ( 9.0) 545 LearJet ( 8.8) 479 777-300 ( 8.3) 553 Concorde ( 8.3) 684 You see why I seldom fly the default aircraft. You see why some of us threw up our hands when first confronting FS2000. Also, if you try out any of the suggested titles, you will see that it is possible to produce quality, good looking, good flying aircraft that result in comfortable frame rates. Notice that the size of the mdl file provides some indication of the frame rate of the aircraft. It is to some extent offset by the volume of the texture files (in the texture folder). For example, the DC-8 Cargo Lion has 10.7 megs of texture, while the Comair has 2.92 megs. There is no perfect correlation that I can find, but the clues are there. My advice? If you really MUST HAVE that airplane, download it, install it, and see what happens. I must confess that I have two or three planes in the stable that do not meet my self-imposed specs, but I like them and from within the cockpit they fly well. If it feels good, fly it! For the record, my display settings are as follows: Resolution = 1280x1024x16 3D Acceleration & Advanced 3D Options all on Overall Image Complexity = Custom Texture quality = 3 Terrain Mesh Complexity = 40 Terrain texture detail distance = 40 Land class complexity = dense Max unlimited visibility = 70 miles Scenery complexity = dense Aircraft shadows = On Ground scenery shadows = Off (this is a big help) Dawn/Dusk texture smoothing = On Smooth transition view = On Image smoothing = On Terrain transitions = On Dynamic scenery = sparse Here's wishing you smooth flying! Robert Seitz rseitz1009@aol.com

How To Fight A Frame Rate Battle In FS2000 By Marc Daniels 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

How To Increase Your Frame Rate Ahh, I can't afford a faster machine, so for all you po' folkes like me here's how I enjoy my 486/66 and still really don't need a faster machine for regular FS scenery. For all the new add-on scenery and Europe II which I love, my 486/66 is just too darn slow. So I still do most of my flying in the US, Hawaii and Europe I with few "homemade" sceneries just because they're too demanding. But I don't settle for slow frame rates, so here's some tips on how to speed things up just in case you don't already know them. Sorry if you already have tried the following, but many people just don't know about the following ideas yet even if they've been flightsimming for years now. Favorite Frame Boosters Make sure that in the preferences, display area the graphics are set to low quality / high frame rate with most flicker... believe me, taking a little flicker on the screen is worth it!! You'll get almost 2 frames per second by doing these things! Make sure that the approach lighting is off! This kills the frame rate at big multi-runway airports. This will give you maybe .5 a frame! Make sure that the dynamic scenery is on minimal. I know it's nice, but you can live without it and depending on if you're looking at some dynamic scenery while flying it cuts frame rate by a good 1, maybe more if on. Make sure that water texture is off. You'll gain a frame from this in water logged sceneries. Don't use cloud thickness. This can reduce frame rates by a .5 or 1 in many locations. THE NUMBER 1 METHOD FOR INCREASING YOUR FRAME RATE: SHRINK YOUR DISPLAY WINDOW SIZE! You will gain up to 3 FPS by reducing the size of your display window to a border like this: Above the instrument panel by almost 1/2", below the top of the screen by a 1/2" and from the sides almost 1.5 - 2" on each side. Now you have a small window to look thru, but you will get used to it, trust me. I fly the jetliners and a smaller window looks better anyway in scale... it looks dumb to have a huge window almost touching the instrument panel... in reality there are side posts, center post on the right and a big dashboard pad and or glareshield panel dividing the window from the big "6" guages so a shrunken window will look fine and give you almost 3 FPS. You'll love it as I have for many years this way. Now, if you employ all of the above methods, I doubt you'll ever see an extra 10 FPS, but each one of the techniques above works in certain situations. Like the runway approach lighting. Having it on won't hurt you until looking at them. If you're flying away from them you'll not have a problem. Same with the water texture and clouds. With all these present at the same time, frame rate will be awful on a 486. With some "homemade" scenery thrown in you'll remember the old days flightsimming on a 8086. Guaranteed... you will ALWAYS see an increase in frame rate all the time by shrinking your window size to as small as you can stand so go for it... and you'll smile when you fly! People always laugh at me for having a shrunken window...but why not, I don't complain about frame rate that much anymore on my 486/66. Here's what I get usually for frame rates now: 20 or so in Kansas, no add-on scenery with a clear sky. 10 or so in Chicago areas, maybe 7 at ORH with full dynamic and clouds. 6 in Innsbruck Austria on Europe I with a clear sky and full dynamic. I rarely see less than 6 except in Europe II now in Paris or something where there's lots of airport detail. It hurts at 5 fps, but I know many people have complained of frame rates of 3 in many areas on a 486/66 and that's because of their big, fat window! So put your window on a diet today... and enjoy!!!!