FS98

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Quell your ego. This is not a competition, and reporting inflated numbers won't make your card any faster, really. You may feel a bit better about your card, but FS98 will run just the same.

Download the file, FSB-FS98.zip and unzip the *.STN files into the PILOTS subdirectory of your flight Simulator directory. You can get the file here.

Start Flight Simulator.

If you have added scenery around Chicago, disable it.

Set the following under "Options/Preferences.../". Please run all Benchmarks using the same options. You may need to restart FS98:

  1. "General": uncheck "Weather Generaton"
  2. "Instrument": check "nonrectangular panel" and "panel resize"
  3. "Sound": check all
  4. "Flight Options": check all
  5. "Display/Image Quality": "high/slow"
  6. "Display/Display Options/":
    1. "Aircraft": Check all
    2. "Scenery": check all. If you are testing 2D display hardware, uncheck the "Image Smoothing" button, (which enables software image smoothing in 2D mode).
    3. "Hardware Acceleration":
      1. "Fullscreen Device Driver": If you are testing 3D video hardware, select the "Primary Display Driver (Direct3D)" driver. If you are testing your 2D card performance, select "Primary Display Driver". If oyu have a Voodoo card in your system, use the Voodoo drivers.
      2. "Fullscreen mode": Choose the resolution you want to run. We strongly suggest running  at 1024x768x16 and 800x600x16 to make comparisons with other cards/systems in the Summary easier. If you select a resolution larger than your 3D card can handle you will automatically (and without warning) default back to 2D. 2D will usualy be 8 bit, and 3D will always be 16 bit.
      3. Many cards coming out are capable of running at higher than 800x600. If you have one of these cards, it is very helpful to have the Benchmarks run at 1152x864 and higher if possible. Make sure that you are still in 3D mode by looking at the scenery (see the Home page).
      4. "Enable Hardware": check this if you are testing 3D hardware.
      5. Check both the "Filter texturemaps" and "MIP mapping" buttons, unless you have found that a freature is not available on your 3D card, or if you have a more effective 'sim experience' with the option unchecked.
      6. Do not check "8-bit Textures" unless there is a performance problem that this option fixes. Sometimes using 16-bit textures causes excessive 'texture paging' where the 3D card has to get textures repeatedly from the system RAM. This problem is seen as many very short pauses in the image.
  7. Load the  first Test by File/Select Flight... and chosing FSB-98-1.  This will set time and conditions.
  8. The situation will begin paused.  Do not unpause, just read the frame rate displayed.  If the frame rate is not displayed, press Shift-Z a couple times. For full screen results press Alt-Enter to switch to full screen mode. Note the average frames per second displayed in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. This is the number you will report for your system.
  9. Now press 'P' to unpause the flight, and note two things: Is the morse code ID a repeating, pure tone, or does the ID sound "garbled" or "warbly"? Does the image on screen 'jump' or 'jitter' (both short-term effects) or does it 'pause' for more than a second at a time?
  10. Now go back to step 7 and repeat for FSB-98-2.  When you run FSB-98-3, don't bother with unpausing and watching what will happen, unless you want to see a crash.
  11. With all these, the frame rate will jump around as you play the videos. I think the most consistent method of determining the average is to watch the FPS for 5 seconds, note the high and low, and average them. If it's obvious that you got a strange reading (if your program took that moment to access the hard drive, for example) rerun the video.
  12. Calculate the average of the three benchmarks you have run.  This value, called FSB, is the primary result of the test.  Report it, as well as the three individual benchmark results, in the Report System.

If you have trouble reading the FPS during these tests:

Download the Frame Rate Display utility here. Unzip the .DLL file into your Modules subdirectory.   Read the included Readme.txt if you want to know all the details.  All you really need is this:

Ctrl-Shift-1    Reset the counter
Ctrl-Shift-2    Freeze the counter
Ctrl-Shift-3    Toggle the counter on/off

The counter displays low-FPS, average-FPS, and Max-FPS, and instantaneous-FPS.

After you have run all three Benchmarks, report how your system did. You should use the Report System.