posted 06-16- 10:52 AM               

if you lower it it will make the nice detailed models stay in view longer but kill your FR's. There's many things we can try but the fact of the matter is we have a 2 year old render and there's nothing we can do unless the programs can update the render.

This would include DX8 support and "enhanced" rendering but this is all in the air so I'm not sure what we could really do.

I've come to learn that IL-2's can push all the polygons they say it can since I got the new GeForce3. We could do the same things they do if the renderer could handle it. This is an age old discussion and one that we really haven't found a solution for yet.

but yes, if you raise the displayrate it's pretty much lowering the switching distance which is a problem on someplanes since they only have 1 LOD (high detail only) (p39, and hurricane I know) and you would have parts just flying int he air.

posted 06-16- 11:58 AM               

And if your CPU/video card are working to maintain a 100 to 200 FPS won't that affect other calculations (physics/FM)? Even with my system (1.2ghz Athlon, 32mb GeForce2 GTS, 512mb 133 ram) a busy mission (especially with the Pacific terrain) will slow my FPS down into the 20's. So why would I want to tax my CPU/video card with unnecessary high FPS when they have trouble handling busy missions?

posted 06-16- 12:14 PM               

It drops in the action due to all the stuff going on, planes flying, guns firing, parts blowing up, planes blowing up, and the phyics engine working overtime. plus you have textures and polys for planes, terrain, and clouds all floating around.

i used to have a diagram for what a "game" uses on a computer and how programmers work to setup the system. But i've seem to misplaced it somewhere.

Anyway, shoot for higher FR's your not really putting a strain on the card cause even if you set it for 200 the card probably can't do that and will only go as high as it can.

posted 06-16- 12:38 PM               

Imah#gine this, the Standard settings are restricting SDOE to playing the game at speeds within the margins set, not allowing your PC to run the game as fast as it could, so when you put lots in a mission, you start to slow down from the max setting in the ini file, OK, now imagine you raise the settings as bmr and I have done, allowing the game to be run as fast as your machine can possibly go, then you load up the mission.. the FR's then come down from it's top speed, rather thn it's limited speed, so that overall you get much better FPS with more aircraft in a mission because the start point for the game to slow down from is much higher, see the ini setting is restricting high end PCs from performing at their best it fixes the highest speed the game will run, adding more stuff then slows it down from that point simply because your pC isn't allowed to run faster. Atleast, thats my understanding from all the tests I've done and from bmrs findings of having 25 aircraft flying, I'm sure he wouldn't get those high FPS if he set it back to a limit of 70 in the ini

I have to agree though that this is quiet unusual, normaly games don't aren't restricted in how fast they can perform, they are allowed to run as fast as your pC can go, but that doesn't seem to be the case with SDOE for some strange reason.

posted 06-16- 12:58 PM            

Your monitor refresh rate ,, or mine anyway ,, is 75mhz at 1024*768

SO save taxing the CPU any more in a wasted fashion that only boosts your ego..

You should, if you have the option,, is pump that extra power into the option ' Render frame rates ahead!.. this is an option withing Geforce 256 tweaker,, called NVMAX..

**Provided your PC is fast , Only go high on this option if you got the graphics memory and you have your AGP X4.
Set your AGP Aperture to your Memory size going no Higher than 256Mb if you have more memory it's only a reference address and only uses it if it need it**

When you raise frame rates above your monitor refresh rates,, your pc strains with more planes on screen.. so your capping you max capacity...

If you want to use that power,,Increase your
DesiredSimRate=20 in INI file to get your physics engine even more accurate!! thats not wasteful!

posted 06-16- 01:48 PM               

When things get really slow the Simulation Rate takes priority.The theory being that its much better to have the planes flying OK at 5 FPS than erractically at 50fps.

When the game is faster than the above example, but perhaps hovering around the DesiredSimRate value i.e. 20, the DisplayRate will start to be sacrificed so the sim code is happy. There may be some sort of balancing algo based on the relativness of the values, so if you set the DisplayRate really high, you may be able to weight it towards DisplayRate.

The bottom line is that so long as the FPS counter is hitting 25-30, your game experiance is going to be pretty good. If you adjust DesiredDisplayRate and this FPS goes up, especially for large missions, then all it means is that you are trading Simulation rate for Display rate. I definitly wouldn't be doing any FM testing while this was happening.

These values have no effect on the visual aspects of the game.

BTW the MaxFrameRate ans MinFrameRate settgins are not used.

------------------

Wings with Wires

posted 06-16- 03:39 PM               

If you were averaging 30FPs on your video card and had the sim rate set to 10 FPS, this means SDOE calculates the effect of controls, speed, wind, etc once every 3 video frames and interpolates the positions for the inbetween frames. This effectively helps unload the CPU when it has to do polygon setup and shift that to the video card that does the rendering. If video frame rate drops below sim rate, the CPU would have to wait for the bus to clear to the card to send the polygon position to the card.

Now- with faster cards and machines, especially cards with their own polygon setup engines (read as GPU), this changes the situation smoewhat. Let's say SDOE was programmed to resolve a problem in so many steps, each step is a clock cycle. It then pushes the results out as fast as possible until the max frame rate is achieved. Now what does it do if both the video and sim rate hit their max numbers?- twiddle it's thumbs.

Remember that each problem is resolved in a specified number of steps. If more clock cycles are available in a certain amount of time, the results are arrived it in less time but still in the sam number of steps.

Setting these numbers too high on a slower machine causes the game to try and play a balancing act between the two and deliver the most important info at the cost of reduced speed on the other frame rate. With many more clock cycles freed up this barrier starts to be removed. Where an older machine needs to set up the polygons in the required clock cycles and then use another cycle to shift the data to the video card, if the card has a GPU all the CPU has to do is shift the tinfo tho the card, freeing more time for physics modeling.

Get the idea how these affect each other? On a fast machine with a GPU and LO'ts of clock cycles, keeping the sim rate low allows it to work on more aircraft in the same amount of time. I think if you kick the sim rate up really high, you'll see the number of aircraft you can use in the game fall off.

On the sim rate- increasing this will give more realistic performance up to a point and then things start to get uncontrollable as every little twitch is picked up by the computer instantaneously. Really you should leave this at 30 max as it seems this will start to cause a slowdown on some of the other operations beyond this point, while making others uncontrollable.

Hope this shed some light on this.

posted 06-16- 04:19 PM               

DesiredDisplayRate=100
MaxFrameRate=100

I haven't altered the DesiredSimRate=20

As they are very close in name I'm sure I've mixed them up and possibly led people to believe I'd made some changes that I actualy hadn't, infact I'm sure Razer thought I menat that I'd changed the DesiredSimRate, when I actualy meant I'd changed the DesiredDisplayRate, 2 very different things that I've mixed you guys up with, sorry, in the other thread that started to cover this I did post exactly what they were, but here i haven't, thought I'd better do it now though

posted 06-16- 08:45 PM               

The bottom line is: This setting is not going to help unless you are already approaching the DesiredDisplayRate setting anyway.

Quake players always maintain that 60fps is the minimum required to play, despite 30fps being around the comfortable level of human perception. I think that this is probably becuase the game rate is related to the display rate, and therefore mouse inputs and input response in general is going to be better with a higher FPS.

In SDOE, the DesiredSimRate is hardcoded to 20FPS (at least in the patch). This is used for all input and everything else except for actual display. The net effect is that having a Display FPS rate higher than 20FPS is not going to enhance your game experiance that much.

BTW the slowing down DOFs ArgonV is seeing is becuase the DesiredSimRate ini setting is used to seed the tick value, which is used as the basis of "real time".

At the end of the day, if you change the setting, and it makes you feel better about the game, do it. At a second look, the Sim rate isn't effected unless Display FPS goes below 5 fps anyway, so it really does no harm.

One other thing to remember is that saying a mission has 25 aircraft is not a frame of reference to compare FPS.

As an example, on my machine, a Athlon700 w/ GF1 a 25 plane mission with all planes on the ground gets about 17fps. Once all the aircraft takeoff the FPS goes up to 30-60, depending on what is in the view.

This is due to the collision detection. the same is true for 25 aircraft widely seperated (high FPS) versus 25 aircraft in formation (low FPS).

There are plenty of other factors as well.

------------------

Wings with Wires

Go here for info about the Unofficial Patch

[This message has been edited by Bryan Russell (edited 06-16-2001).]

posted 06-16- 10:43 PM               

I fully agree on this point, thats why this was originaly intended for people with high end machines, as a "for instance", on my Duron 900 (@1Ghz) with the Voodoo3 2000, before I changed the setting I would max out around 45 FPS, but now I maxout at 97, that is realy the ultimate max with full detail settings, meaning nothing in view other than second level LODs of a single aircraft nothing else in the mission and nothing else in view, but where we're realy seeing the difference is that faster machines are performing better now with more aircraft, myself I can't run any faster, the Voodoo is holding it back now, but I do think that it seems by just changing the DesiredDisplayRate to a number that more acturately represents what your PC can do at it's best yields better results, again though this is intended for high speed machines, but then, if they can do it, then thats cool, atleast someone gets benefit from it, the thing in the end is we're not worried about how high the FPS is with a single aircraft, we always wanted more aircraft in the air, and this realy does seem to have helped to do that, atleast for myself and bmr, so far I've not read from others that may have changed this, I doubt maney have because they'll be following the conversation to decided on if they should or not c'mon guys, if it doesn't help you can always change it back lol.