ORIGINAL: johndou
Run your own tests I really don't care - I was sharing information that I thought others could beneift from.
Jim Bourke the Senior Sargeant, Top Guy, Big Muckie Muck at KnifeEdge Software said: "Water consumes a lot of graphics processing power when it is turned up to HIGHEST quality. At LOW quality it consumes very little.
Everything that is rendered by the sim takes some time. If you run the sim at high resolution, full AA, with quality levels HIGHEST, only a very high end machine will net you 30 fps.
...Since the physics run at a high rate all the time you should be tailoring your graphical quality to something in the 45 fps range or so. You can go down to 30 or even 25 fps if you like ...
If you'd like to dispute what he has to say - feel free. I happen to be someone who wants to listen and learn from what he has to say ... but hey that's just me.
The fact is that most people will begin to see a differrence - call it flutter or jumping, whatever you like - at anything less then 60fps. That has to do with the way the brain processes moving images, some sort of scientific fact stuff. If you're getting 25 fps and not seeing any "difference", then good for you. You probably have a better ability to slur slow moving images in your brain. Either that or your brain just moves slower then the rest of us ... Even the head honcho guy says that you should tailor your system for 45 fps... by turning the graphics DOWN!
Some people need all of that eye candy - others don't. For those of us who don't then why buy G4? For those of us who do, realize that a high end machine will be required. That's information that people should be aware of. That and the fact that the head honcho says that: "If you run the sim at high resolution, full AA, with quality levels HIGHEST, only a very high end machine will net you 30 fps."
I'm sure people will benefit from it if they put it into perspective. So give some perspective. The test was an absolute max one.
Who's disputing what the guy said. The explanation is simple. The game also runs almost everything pretty good. Even that isolated fps readout test. The airplane flew in that test pretty good. OK, on my machine, pretty great. And isn't to be feared. And could run at optimum efficiency quite easily if the airplanes or choppers you fly aren't the fps hogs, and if the flying fields you like to fly on aren't fps hogs. I just now chose to fly an Ultimate at a couple of fields. I got excellent fps at all of them. I also flew all the different gliders at all the slopes and got excellent fps. And noticed the quite extraordinary clouds. They came past in wisps. An extra I've not seen before, and quite an interesting and useful feature. And darned if I thought to see what the fps meter was saying because I didn't notice anything that would suggest that my machine was giving optimum efficiency.