How to get smooth perfomance in this sim
 

Load a mission with lots of planes and when your plane is running look at the prop animation. It is most likely intermittent and jerky. The prop animation in this sim is your clue to how smooth your fps are. You want to aim for smooth prop animation with no stutters or intermittent stops, just continous smooth rotation at all rpm's.

How do you get this, simple you use a frame rate limiter. I use Bandicam. I found this program to work where others did not. Bandicam is a video capture program like fraps but it has a fps limiter you can use. Download the program (free to use if unregistered) and set the fps to 30. You might also set the hot key for the limiter so you can experiment with it on or off in the game.

Now go into the game and fly a mission that has had stutters and uneven performance. Use the onscreen fps graphic to see if you have the limiter on and watch your prop animation. Make sure it is on (fps will drop to 30 if on) and watch your prop animation smooth out. Flying is smoother now with less hickups.

The trick is to balance your COD settings with the limiter so you can maintain a steady 30 fps. If it dips below it at any time during a complexe mission change your settings to avoid the dips.

This works great in all games I play except FSX. For some reason FSX jutters at 30 fps limited for me. Try it but remember your prop animation is your guide, make it smooth and all else follows.

Many gamers cannot get their head around a frame rate cap, they just don't understand it and it goes against all they have worked for. I had to prove it to myself and now I know what it does and that it works. Even Nvidia knows this works because their October driver release will feature a frame rate limiter.

Yup, for FSX, you get MUCH better frame rates with the frame rate set to unlimited. Only realised this recently and it made such a huge difference. Has allowed me to push most of the graphics slider to the max now.

PPP

Works for me...! Set frame limiter at 37 fps... 70% less stutter now...
Thanks mate!

Kegetys made a free frame rate limiter... I imagine it uses less resources than a vid cap proggy...

http://www.kegetys.net/misc/ (look for D3Dantilag)

Reminds me of a discussion I recently had regarding 3d displays and you're right. It might depend on the engine though (as you also pointed out already)
Although I might add that 30 is sadly a bit low but that will go away as soon as the hardware improves.

Cheers

For some reason I can't get bandicam to work in game. It works fine until I get into the cockpit. it seems to remain with the original launcher window.

Strange, it works ok for me. I could not get Kegety's one to work with COD though.

Wasn't thinking - it's only for DX9 so it's not worth it. :(

It may be a Win7 64 bit problem. Good idea, though.

Downloaded & installed no prob. Fps limiter works as described -- smooths prop animation when engaged, most noticeable at low rpm's. Didn't see much difference in smoothness nor micro stutters, but need to do lots more evaluating first. I did notice a huge decrease in workload on my two SLI'd video cards when the Bandicam fps limiter (set to 30) was engaged. The workloads of both dropped immediately from ~65% down to ~27% each, quality was still very good. I thought the joystick animation might have appeared a little choppier at 30 fps than when running at 55-60 fps - but not a whole lot - still acceptably smooth.

Definitely worth further experimenting. I especially want to try movie making and screenshots.

Doesnt Vsync already cap the FPS to your screens resolution?

Vsync caps the FPS to your screen's refresh rate and divisions of it, so on a 60hZ monitor with Vsync enabled you can only have 60, 30 or 15 FPS (at least that's what i remember from reading posts by the resident forum gurus). This however is something that can be worked around by enabling triple buffering, which once again enables the game to run whatever FPS it can.

All in all, FPS limiters are useful because they enable the GPU to split its workload in easier to manage "slices": if the card knows it needs to keep 30-40 FPS then it won't devote extra resources to render 60 FPS and that gives it enough time and spare resource to process other things that might crop up, instead of running at 70FPS when you look at the sea and then bogging down the moment you turn your view to look at a forest or ground objects ;)

Same here. I select LAUNCHER.exe in Bandicam and when in cockpit FPS counter/limiter stop works... Any hint? :confused:

It did this for me when I tried it with Nvidia Inspector so I removed the Inspector profile and it started to work again.

Max fps is 60 too with triblebuffering, but next drop after 60 is 45, not 30.

If i understand it correctly.

yes i have also known this it seems obvious what i didnt know is that nvidia is putting one out with their next driver release, which is awsome since ive wanted something like this....you think this trick would work in Arma 2??

So wait a minute, bandicam only works in DirectX9?

no it works with dx10 also.

I am not sure why they moved this thread here but if I wanted it here I would have put it here.

It should be on the main forum as I think it is important and that is where the traffic is, put it back or I will just repost it.

I should have asked if it works with DX11.
Certainly doesn't with me.

That's not true at all. What triple buffering does is store three frames in the frame buffer. That's it. It will not affect vsync if it's turned on in the way you describe.

The ideal settings in ANY GAME if your system can achieve over 60fps CONSTANT is to enable vsync and triple buffering. Triple buffering can have a positive affect on vsync in that the frame rate halving people spoke off can be avoided with this Tertiary buffer.

One thing to keep in mind is the amount of front and back buffer your card can use. If your running at 1080p then you'd need a 2GB video card as a 1GB probably won't have enough memory to store the third frame.

I would enable vsync and triple buffering people !!!

If you have an AMD/ATI card try this utility http://www.radeonpro.info or ATI Tray Tools

If you have an nVidia card try this utility http://downloads.guru3d.com/MSI-Afte...load-2799.html