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.