Frames Per Second effects realism?

[HeliAZ]

Hi-

I'm new to this forum and trying my hand at learning Helis with FMS. I have a JR 8103 connected and I'm running a 300mhz with no graphic acceleration and I thought things were running fine and felt like I could handle the ThreeDee Model pretty well. I was only getting 5-8 fps though. Now I've turned off all textures and fog and it upped the FPS to about 16-20 but now the ThreeDee is a completely different model. Alot more touchy. How many FPS should I be aiming for to get a fairly realistic feel of a helicopter?

Thanks

[Andypandy]

To be honest 25-30FPS at a minimum for heli's, preferably over 30FPS.

If you can afford it, I'd recommend getting some graphics acceleration. Assuming you have an AGP port on your computers motherboard, then I'd recommend a S/H Geforce 2MX.

These are very cheap to pick up and will make a big difference with FMS. Also, with your spec machine, a faster card won't make much difference to the FPS, as the sim will be processor limited.

One of the great things about FMS (apart from it being free) is that it will run on very modest hardware.

As a guide I'm currently running a Pentium II 450Mhz computer with a Geforce 2 Titanium 64MB card.
I get a minimum of 30FPS with the helicopters at 1280x1024 resolution, with 16 bit graphics (32 bit graphics doesn't show any clear advantage in FMS IMHO).
I used to run a Geforce 2MX 32MB card, and that gave similar results at a slightly lower resolution.

Steer clear of ATI cards, as they can prove problematic with FMS. Also don't bother with Voodoo cards, they don't have any Hardware T&L which FMS seems to need.

Cheers

Andy