but you do benchmark both every time. benchmarks only gives you fps and you already get that in the game. so you can compare how you do in the town against how you do in the field. if you want to compare fps then all you do is ask players to post their fps.
if you really want to stress your system to it's limits then use something like 3dmark and ask others to post their info. that would be a little bit more useful.
in the game it wont be as useful since there's portions of some maps where fps will take a dip. I am pretty sure you can make a note of that and compare it against next time you fly.
semp
I meant a flat, open plain or grassy field. And the town would include a flyover of the airfield and whatnot. Sorry for not being clear on that issue.
The thing is, benchmark helps out in terms of what you can and can't do without ruining game play. Popping into the game knowing you have well more than enough hardware capability to run something at max, only to find yourself tanking badly when you shouldn't, is very frustrating. In a way it does alert folks to stuff as in; "Wait a sec. I KNOW my machine can run this at max with 120 fps. Why is it flopping at this point here???". Example being that I have 2x 5770 Radeon's, and I CANNOT have AA on whatsoever, or my FPS tanks BADLY. This should NOT be happening, but it does. Thing is, I just don't care enough to bother getting it checked out because turning off AA (while making everything jaggedy), doesn't really degrade the visuals enough for me to bugger off. I use to play on almost absolute min graphics in the past (only having enough power to have terrain set to see where water truly is), so my current issue don't bother me too much.
I can tell you when my problem roughly came about though. This happened around the time HiTech made a change to the gunners in bombers. The change introduced a bug where, if the lead bomber plane lost a wing tip, you would lose all three planes. The drones would act like their wing tips were gone, even if they suffered ZERO damage. It was around this time I couldn't use AA anymore. Just kinda degraded from there.
I myself wish AH had a benchmark and/or an auto-analyzer that some games come with that would set your "default" video settings to what would keep your machine at 60+ FPS. Otherwise it's all trial and error.