Low FPS on Animation Playback I have a question about animation "best practices": If I want to render my animation at 24 fps, does that mean I also need my animation preview/playback window to run at 24 fps?

Some details: I've created 15 second walk-cycle scene that I want to render at 24 fps. However, when I use the animation playback feature (alt-a), the highest framerate I'm able to achieve is 16 fps. As a result, I've prepared an animation that looks reasonable at 16 fps but is much too fast at 24 fps. Of course, I could rescale my keyframes to compensate for the difference after I've finished the animation, but I'd prefer to see something close to the finished animation the whole time.

Some optimizations I've tried to increase the playback framerate:


Sync Mode set to "Frame Dropping"
All objects except my character and camera are set to be invisible
All subsurf modifiers are set to their lowest level
The shading mode is set to "solid" or "wireframe"


Are there additional things I can do to increase the playback framerate? Or do I just need to work around my current 16 fps playback framerate?
Things you can try to improve viewport performance:


Enable VBOs in User Preferences > System. This should speed up drawing of highly complex scenes with lots of geometry.
Enable Only Render under the display panel of the 3D viewport. This will hide extra lines and wireframes, which are slow to draw.
Disable Double Sided in the object properties editor for high polygon mesh. This is especially helpful on Fermi-level Nvidia cards.
Turn off modifiers you don't need in the viewport.
Use Simplify in the Scene property editor to globally reduce the complexity of the scene.
Make sure you are viewing the scene in Solid mode, it's typically faster than all the other mode, including wireframe.
If you are using physics simulations like particles or cloth, make sure they are baked. Otherwise, Blender will try to recalculate them every time you switch frames.