That’s a good question because I suspect that few players know unless they customarily run FRAPS all of the time.
Unless you have a very fast CPU, your frame rate depends upon your view and zoom level. For instance, switching between external (camera 1) and bridge (camera 2) can sometimes change the frame rate by as much as a factor of 2 or more.
This can have a large effect on the true speed of your ship (the distance it covers in a given clock time).
Many players probably consider 12 FPS adequate for normal play and don’t realize that it is that low. Without running FRAPS, a clue that your frame rate is marginal is when, after rotating the camera 1 view with the mouse, it takes a few frames to stop at the new view.
The frame time (the time from displaying one frame to displaying the next) has two parts:
1, The time it takes for QV to render the frame and for the display adapter to display it is usually quite short. If that were the only component of frame time, most systems would deliver 30 fps.
2, The largest part of the frame time is usually the time spent outside of QV in computing the position and attitude of every object that can move, and examining any possible conflicts with AI objects. This process is started by QV after rendering a frame, and must finish before QV can render the next frame.
Trouble in those computations is the main cause of “QuestViewer errorsâ€, which are not errors in QV itself, but errors reported by QV.
It would be interesting if members would experiment, using FRAPS, and report their actual frame rates under various views in different missions.