Does Wing flex Have a Significant Effect on Performance in User Aircraft?
In the A321 topic there was debate whether the wing flex was actually noticeable enough to warrant the FPS impact of modeling it. Well I wanted to test it and given that I am the modeler of the 737, I have a perfect test bed as the aircraft as it has the performance needs of similar freeware aircraft and I can do whatever I need for the experiment on the model.
Test Rig:
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004
FRAPS
Enigmasim 737-300 Winglets
Gateway Laptop With AMD Athlon Dual Core @ 2.1 GHz, 4 GB DDR3 RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon HD4250 with 256MB Dedicated Memory
Wingflex Control:
This is the control where I have the most current version of the 300 with nothing changed to the wing flex. FRAPS benchmark reads 60 FPS Average
No Flex:
Now what I did is I removed all flex animations, Wing flex name tags, and merged the wing sections into one instead of 3 sections.
Benchmark reads 60 FPS Average
Conclusion:
There is no Significant impact from a user aircraft on the frame rate from wing flex. I think where this myth came from is the AI People in the FS world in where they reduce anything and everything that could impact performance. In the AI world something that hardly effects performance on a User aircraft, when multiplied over multiple AI Aircraft, will become a frame rate killer. In Conclusion wing flex has no real impact when used on a user aircraft.
