People love playing flight simulators as it simulates an actual flying experience. Of course the more realistic the experience the better. A flight simulator is mainly a visual experience and so the graphics are vitally important. The graphics performance depends on a number of variables, include how detailed the scenery is and how smoothly the graphics are displayed. The computer has a great impact on the second component, how smoothly the scenery is displayed. The technical name for the frequency with which the graphics are displayed is called the frame rate.
Frame rate refers to the number of times that the screen is updated to simulate a moving picture. It is measured in frames per second, of fps. A frame rate of 5 frames per second will not look smooth at all and will look jerky. A frame rate of 5fps will not look realistic at all. For comparison purposes, a television has a frame rate of 30 frames per second (NTSC system which is used in the U.S) and 24 frames per second (PAL system used in Europe and Australia). A realistic looking picture must be updated at least 15 times per second.
To obtain higher frame rates, there are a couple of options. Option one is to upgrade the computer. A computer with high end specifications will have better performance and produce higher frame rates. The most important components to look at upgrading are the processor speed, the computer memory and the video card. If you are running Microsoft Flight Simulator you will also need a 3D video card. To get the best performance, you would want to have at least a 3.0GHz process, more than 2GB of memory and 512MB of video memory.
The other option to improve your frame rates is to change the setup of your computer. There are a number of areas you can change with your computer that won’t cost money and may increase performance. One simple improvement is to update the drivers on your video card. Often the video drivers can become out of date and installing the latest will increase the performance. Updating the drivers is a simple fix and may be a quick win to improving your frame rate. Secondly, look at what other programs are running on the computer. Check that no unneeded programs are running in the background. To get the best performance for your flight simulator, we need to close as many other programs as possible to free the computer’s resources. Lastly, play around with the graphics settings inside the flight simulator software, it is often a process of trial and error, but you can find optimal settings that will improve the frame rate.
For more information on flight simulator controls, including the flight simulator yoke go to www.flightsimulatoryoke.org
Posted under Miscellaneous Content
This post was written by admin on July 30, 2010
