It brings up some points about 30 vs 60 fps and people who only want 60 because their hardware is good etc etc. From what I’ve seen a lot of the people complaining just don’t seem to understand what frame rate is and what it actually means to what is going on. One guy even commented that he wanted 60 fps or higher because he didn’t want input lag…just seriously WTF. I wish people would research things and then post a well informed argument but if we all did that then we’d likely have world peace by now.
Put this up here to see what you guys think. Would you require/recommend 60 fps from all games as hardware can do that now or do you think 30 fps is still ok?
To me 60 fps is required more when you’re playing a first person shooter or similar game with tight controls and a lot of reflex moves, having that smoother movement from higher frame rate helps it look more visually appealing. Whereas if you’re playing a digital board game, card game, turn based strategy etc 30 fps is fine.
Locking the frame rate makes no sense to me. If someone can afford the hardware to play games at 60Hz and above, then they should be able to play at that frame rate. Offering the option to limit is fine too for those on laptops.
My next gaming monitor is most likely going to be 144Hz.
The only argument I can see for locking it is when the movements are tied to the frame rate. If the game is designed to run at 30 fps to make it easier for the game dev and at 60 fps everything runs twice as fast and breaks the game.
I haven’t delved deep enough into Unity yet to find out what the frame rates it runs at are…but I was assuming 60 was the standard for it.
I just don’t see why people get so angry about 30 fps if having a higher frame rate would have no difference on the game.
A wildly fluctuating frame rate is said to be as distracting as too low a framerate, even if it remains above the desired minimum. Locking is useful when a game targets and is designed around 30hz, but where the target hardware is able to run some parts of the game much faster than that. So, essentially, when the scene complexity in your game greatly varies from time to time.
It typically shouldn’t be used as an excuse for not having written framerate independent code. There are indeed things where that’s a perfectly reasonable approach (eg: it’s done with physics systems to maintain simulation stability), but there’s typically no reason to tie those things to the rendering frame rate (eg: Unity’s physics is a good example - Update and FixedUpdate get called at different rates specifically because physics isn’t tied to the rendering frame rate).
Depends entirely on the game. If it genuinely makes no difference (eg: a game using cell animations drawn at 30fps), or if 30fps is desired for artistic or stylistic reasons (eg: the “film look” often means matching film frame rates of 30 or even 24fps), or if it’s looking to save processing power/energy usage (a growing concern as games become more mobile), I think it’s fine to cap the frame rate.
See my previous post for thoughts on using it to hide flaws or to fix timing issues.
I like the approach taken by some games. They allow you to choose from a selection of framerates, but also provide the option to smooth it to hide fluctuations. It seems to work great for those games I’ve seen it on.
Even with things like FR smoothing, if you hit an async piece or look at a place with potentially dynamic lighting your frame rate will be variable (happens in pretty much any 3D AAA game I’ve every played). Now think of it like a “budget” if your FR starts going into the red like 20 FPS you will notice a lot of stutter / slowdown as you look around in 3D screen space as the GPU grinds.
It doesn’t matter if controls and phsyx are independent, as the camera you’re tracking with still needs to render what’s on screen.
If you aim for 60 FPS, then you have a lot more “budget” to play with. So if for some reason the screen rate drops down to 40FPS with FRSM you don’t really notice it at all. If you can keep your game @ a constant 30 FPS across the board, then fine but it just doesn’t happen in 3D games.
P.S I watched the video, studies show graphics sell games LOL!..
Care to actually pose an argument to back up that statement? I asked for what people think about 30 vs 60 fps if you care to contribute to the discussion then please go for it.
Dark souls doesn’t care about your pathetic master race rig. Prepare to die. At 30fps locked.
Joking aside, back in the day I’d run various quakes at 120fps ish with monitor refresh around 85hz. I can see higher than 100 but it’s not so important to me beyond 85. At 60 it’s a bit smush but I can tolerate it. At 30 it’s perfectly OK because generally a game will have nice motion blur.
In short as long as a game never drops below 30 + high quality motion blur I’m perfectly happy.
Dark Souls doesn’t need it though. Also being a port from console (albeit a dodgy one) I imagine it would have taken a lot of extra work to enable 60 fps. Likely way more than their budget.
And there you go. Most games don’t need it. Street fighter 4 and a twitch shooter would. As for framerate police, they’re just children. Most of the internet’s elitist noise comes from children. Not sure why people are listening to kids who haven’t even held down a day job or understood the world properly yet.
Except 120fps. You can get used to 30fps, but if you play 60fps games for a while and then start a game locked to 30fps, it looks really stuttery and yuck. The same thing happens, albeit to a lesser extent, when going from 120fps to 60fps…you may think 60fps is “smooth”, because you’re used to it, but after experiencing 120fps, you realize that it’s not really. The problem, of course, is that 120Hz monitors aren’t common, and getting games to consistently run at that rate can be difficult. But it sure is nice if you can manage it.
Yep but the reason I say “framerate police are kids” is because on one hand they demand the very best in visuals and rendering but on the other hand complain when their ultra setting drops fps below what their hardware can manage… this is the most common kind of idiot and an actual problem for developers.
It’s a problem so much so that developers have resorted to flat out disabling features quietly - usually things that push past memory budget and would cause excessive transfer of new textures etc.
Wanting a higher framerate so you can have less input lag is pretty reasonable.
After all It is the reason we place input controls into Update rather than FixedUpdate.
I strongly prefer higher framerates. I love first person shooter style games, and 30 fps stutters and lags compared to 60 fps for those types of games. 30 fps is fine for a lot of other genre of games, though.
BTW, that Extra Credits episode did an excellent job of example the concepts. They even remembered to bring up the issues with v-sync where a game that falls below 60 fps will actually run at 30 fps due to the way v-sync works with monitors. With v-sync on, a game running 65 fps will render at 60 fps, but a game running at 55 fps will render at 30 fps.
You can get used to 30fps, but if you play 60fps games for a while and then start a game locked to 30fps, it looks really stuttery and yuck. The same thing happens, albeit to a lesser extent, when going from 120fps to 60fps…you may think 60fps is “smooth”, because you’re used to it, but after experiencing 120fps, you realize that it’s not really. The problem, of course, is that 120Hz monitors aren’t common, and getting games to consistently run at that rate can be difficult. But it sure is nice if you can manage it.