What is FPS. I know it is frames per second, but what is that and what can i use it for. -Thanks

Hi

FPS lets you know how many times the screen is rendered, ( DX Page Flipped per second ). Therefore 50 fps is better than 30 fps, cause the screen is being rendered 50 times instead of example 30 times a second.

hehe I can''t explain very well but I hoped this helped

Erick

It''s kind of a measure of smoothness. If you can render 4 FPS, then your game is very jerky and slow, and needs changing and optimizing, or fixing. If you can crank out 45 on the average system, it''s good to go. For something to compare against, most TVs and VCRs are 24 FPS, and DVDs are 30, I believe.


Lack

All of the above is correct. The more frames you can render per second, the better your game will look, up to a point. The human eye can only destinguish between 50 to 70 FPS, depending on the person. Anything about that is a waste. Besides, most monitors can''t show more than 60 or so anyway.

Think of a cartoon. If you slow it down enough, it looks like several pictures changing. If you speed it up, it begins to look fluid to the eye. This same illusion is used in games.

Also, FPS can be a great tool in determining how well your program runs. By keeping track of FPS, you can tell how well your game is running, and you can see how well certain changes to your game work.

To continue what I-Shaolin was saying, if you were to aim for the "optimal" frame rate, it would be equal to (and synchronized with) the monitors'' refresh rate. This will eliminate tearing (the display of an incomplete, partially blitted image). There is also no point in producing images any faster, the display of images is limited to the speed of the refresh cycle, which is usually set towards the upper limit of what the human eye can absorb.

Do not put all your focus on getting the highest FPS rate. Although it''s by far the most used benchmark measure, it''s not always the most indicative of how "good" a game is. If you have extra compute cycles left over, they can be used for something else (e.g. better AI).

As a side note, I just wrote a down and dirty converter that turns Quake characters into my custom mesh format. They''re only actually animated at 10 fps.

Overclockers beware!

also, FPS can mean "first-person shooter"

Some clarification:
FPS can mean frames per second or first person shooter, as everyone has metioned before, but it can also mean *fields* per second.
__Fields are "half-frames" of either odd or even numbered lines. This is how television works, starting from the top of the screen drawing horizontal lines. First all the odd lines are drawn from top to bottom, then all of the even lines [or is that even then odd?]
__US [NTSC] television runs at 59.97 fields per second [fps] [29.985 frames] and European [PAL] at about 50 fps [sorry I don''t know the exact number.] Yes, they are not intergers, but I forget why <br>__US film is 24 Frames Per Second [FPS] and European is 25 FPS in general. Animated movies are done at 18 FPS quite often, to save on creation time.<br>__Last thing: If you''ve got flourescent lighting, you''ll probably want to make sure your monitor / video card is set to a frequency higher than 60hz. I know my eyes bug-out after just a few minutes of looking at 60hz.

That''s a bit technical.