Originally Posted by SPUDLEY1977 (Post 59103)

In my feeble mind the missing link is the monitor. Consider that our current fastest LCD Monitors cannot "in effect" properly present much more than about 60 Hertz "refresh rates". To my thinking then any time FPS is above this number you will not see it because the LCD monitor cannot update the screen more than 60 or 75 times a second. In the remaining discussion I will refer to 60 Mhz as I cannot see the diff between 75 and 60 on my "2ms" Viewsonic which is highly rated by those that have the gear to rank responsiveness of LCD's. Note that as of yet even the best "2ms" LCDs are closer to 8 or 10 ms average since all colors are not are not as responsive as the fastest.

For those of you out there that have a "2ms" refresh rate monitor and are showing 60 FPS at high detail in your app/game just go disable VSYNC and see if your FPS are significantly higher.

When I do this my FPS jump from 60 to over 1xx in some of the more taxing games. Watch something like a plane or car move across the screen. When comparing 60 FPS vs 100 FPS
does the object look like a solid moving object or does it appear to ghost/flicker/not be a solid focused object that moves? My observations are that at 100 FPS the object does not appear any more solid/focused than at 60, the ojects/game is not any smoother. At these higher FPS you may see a byproduct of the fact that LCD cannot refresh fast enough (above 60 FPS) you may observe monitor artifacts like texture smearing/tearing. This is why games that with given hardware are often suggested that we switch VSYNC to on, note that when you do so your FPS drop to either 60 or 75.

In contrast for LCD's 30 vs 60 FPS is noticeably different since the LCD can effect double its screen writing/refreshing when going from 30 to 60 within its technological capacity.

Do the above with a good CRT monitor that truely refreshes at 60, 75, 80, above = you will see the differences as the CRT can truely process these higher FPS. Unfortunately the LCD of today's technology at "2 ms" cannot present your eyeballs the benefit of hardware that can process higher FPS...UNLESS YOUR LCD CAN SHOW IT!

I wont even start to address Input Lag.....this only adds to my observations and conclusion above.

You may wish to research:
Refresh Rate
VSYNC
Screen Tearing
CRT refresh rates
LCD's and how they are very different from CRTs
GTG : Grey to Grey
On Off On
Input Lag
Pixelanne ( I think is the name) - a great little program that is used to compare "refresh rates"/responsitivity of both CRT and LCD monitors. I cannot locate this as my spelling may be wrong. Please correct me if you know.

All these contribute to my thoughts of the "Missing Bottleneck" (limitations of current LCD technology)....my opinion posted as it might be of value to one or two of you who might prefer not to waste money on higher FPS that you never see/enjoy.

Originally Posted by TheFamilyMan (Post 59336)

So, Nehalem is OK? (course correction back to the OP)

Buying a core 2 duo/quad system now locks you into tech that is at end of life. There won't be any significantly faster/better CPUs in this line coming out in the months ahead. In this regard Nehalem is the way to go, but it's worth waiting a few months for one if you can.

As for dual/quad processing. Being a software developer whose been developing multi-threaded multi-processor, and multi-host applications for years now, I can't imagine Oleg's team not developing a sim that does not fully take advantage of the potential computational environment that multi-core CPUS provide. In this I mean that the sim could be designed to scale across as many cores as are available. As an example, consider that each AI aircraft (or online for that matter) were a separately schedulable execution thread (that's the way I'd design it, and I've done this exact sort of thing with analytic sims professionally). With proper design, each of these threads would drift off to the least busy core to execute, and thus more cores give you that much more AI computational bandwidth.

And finally a word to those who think vsync is for sissy: you are deluding yourselves for a pretty silly reason. Why? A computer creates animation in the exact same manner at a film movie, i.e. animation is a series of still pictures shown at a fixed rate which when viewed by the human eye appear to create an image that moves. That fixed rate for a computer is the maximum refresh rate of your monitor. When vsync is turned off, the computer is allowed to display one of the still pictures on the monitor while the computer is still filling in that same picture, thus creating one or more tear lines in the displayed image (the previous image is overwritten during the fill operation). And even if you are not seeing tearing, the max rate that the picture changes on your monitor is its max refresh rate: all those FPS that exceed your monitor's refresh rate are NEVER even displayed! What vsync does is lock the update of a picture such that it won't be displayed until the update is complete; but also there is more than one picture buffer, so one is being displayed while one or more are being updated. But hey, that warm fuzzy feeling of seeing that FRAPS display of 140 fps (and don't forget that hefty average) on your 75htz monitor can't be beat...right? Get a life!