Why do some PC games look smooth on 30 while others are barely playable?

[DarkMesa]

"Something like that is answered with a simple Google Search."

 

I have noticed that many games on my PC run well at 30 FPS (Games like FarCry 3 BD and F1 2014) while others feel barely playable (Such as The Witcher 2).

I remember reading something about this long ago but I can't find that Article anymore, after watching Linus' latest video on Tech Quickie about Minimum Requirements and stuff, I was really wondering if a game would play smooth on 30 or would be laggy as hell, is there a way to find that out? (Except watching Benchmark Videos on YouTube, my GPU isn't that used anymore so I don't always find video benches)

[Shreyas1]

Maybe it's not at a stable FPS as in it drops frames and stuff like that?

[COUPER MILLAR]

Id say a lot of this comes down to 1% and 0.1% lows. if you're averaging 30 fps and have 1% lows in the mid 20's it will feel a lot smoother than averaging 30 fps with 1% lows <10 fps. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

It depends on how consistent the frame rate was. Also if the games employed some motion blurring, it could give the same effect as watching a movie assuming the frame rate was consistent.

[vanished]

10 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

It depends on how consistent the frame rate was. Also if the games employed some motion blurring, it could give the same effect as watching a movie assuming the frame rate was consistent.

This is really it.  If you get consistently paced frames, even though it's only 30 it might be palatable to some, but if you render 30 frames all in 100 ms, then do nothing for the remaining 900, it's gonna feel and look terrible.

[Taja]

Well, in addition to what ppl said, some games just dont need a lot of fps. For example, a game like cities skylines is playable at 20 fps easily.

Fps games need higher fps, as other fast paced games.

[vanished]

15 minutes ago, Taja said:

Well, in addition to what ppl said, some games just dont need a lot of fps. For example, a game like cities skylines is playable at 20 fps easily.

Fps games need higher fps, as other fast paced games.

True, as unpleasant as it might be, anything that's just "control and oversight" (cities skylines, civ V, etc.), don't really need to run well to be enjoyable.  Games where you're running around an interacting with the environment a lot though (Driving, running, flying, platformer, basically and first or third person game) are another story though.

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 hours ago, Taja said:

Well, in addition to what ppl said, some games just dont need a lot of fps. For example, a game like cities skylines is playable at 20 fps easily.

Fps games need higher fps, as other fast paced games.

Yeah, I never understood the foaming at the mouth when something like a turn-based JRPG port on Steam is locked at 30 FPS. I really need that extra 30 FPS or higher to react quicker to... oh wait.

[vanished]

15 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Yeah, I never understood the foaming at the mouth when something like a turn-based JRPG port on Steam is locked at 30 FPS. I really need that extra 30 FPS or higher to react quicker to... oh wait.

I think it's because there's no reason for it not to run higher.  Does it need to?  No, but could it, and would it be nice if it did?  Yes to both.  That's where/why people start to get annoyed.

[Mira Yurizaki]

5 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I think it's because there's no reason for it not to run higher.  Does it need to?  No, but could it, and would it be nice if it did?  Yes to both.  That's where/why people start to get annoyed.

I don't think they could because a lot of them design the timing around the frame rate.

 

I mean, I've heard arguments all the time about how locked frame rates are "bad", but eh. Those arguments usually don't come from game developers.

[vanished]

1 minute ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I don't think they could because a lot of them design the timing around the frame rate.

That's really bad design

[Mira Yurizaki]

Just now, Ryan_Vickers said:

That's really bad design

Is it? Because a locked frame rate design means if you can run the game at the frame rate it wants, then it should work consistently regardless of what else you throw at it. If the game doesn't use its timing around the frame rate, then you have to make sure whatever you claim your game works on doesn't have timing issues. If you don't need the performance then from a developer point of view, it's less hassle to lock it down.

 

Some things that look bad may not necessarily mean they're bad. Recently my lead wanted to have a status message from a component be sent periodically rather than have it be event driven. While it's "better" to have it be event driven because it means that you're not sending the same data 90% of the time (the status doesn't change often), it's more reliable from a user experience point of view to just periodically send it so the receiver of this status always has recent data rather than hope the event driven mechanic works because sometimes it won't.

 

Besides, at least it's not bad as Beatmania. Beatmania's timing is tied down to how close the monitor is to the NTSC refresh rate and if the monitor is off by even a fraction of a percent, you're never going to perform well.

[vanished]

3 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Is it? Because a locked frame rate design means if you can run the game at the frame rate it wants, then it should work consistently regardless of what else you throw at it. If the game doesn't use its timing around the frame rate, then you have to make sure whatever you claim your game works on doesn't have timing issues. If you don't need the performance then from a developer point of view, it's less hassle to lock it down.

 

Some things that look bad may not necessarily mean they're bad. Recently my lead wanted to have a status message from a component be sent periodically rather than have it be event driven. While it's "better" to have it be event driven because it means that you're not sending the same data 90% of the time (the status doesn't change often), it's more reliable from a user experience point of view to just periodically send it so the receiver of this status always has recent data rather than hope the event driven mechanic works because sometimes it won't.

 

Besides, at least it's not bad as Beatmania. Beatmania's timing is tied down to how close the monitor is to the NTSC refresh rate and if the monitor is off by even a fraction of a percent, you're never going to perform well.

I think it is.  I can't think of a single good reason why things like the physics engine or anything else for that matte should be tied to the frame rate.  They're separate functions.  One is controlling where things go, and one is rendering it to the screen.  When I think back over games that have gotten a lot of flak for their framerates, a few that stand out are ones that had everything tied together (NFS rivals, Skyrim, etc.)

[Mira Yurizaki]

8 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I think it is.  I can't think of a single good reason why things like the physics engine or anything else for that matte should be tied to the frame rate.  They're separate functions.  One is controlling where things go, and one is rendering it to the screen.  When I think back over games that have gotten a lot of flak for their framerates, a few that stand out are ones that had everything tied together (NFS rivals, Skyrim, etc.)

I can think of one: fighting games. Almost every fighting game as far as I know bases timing around which frame something happened at. And the reason is for consistency as players use a frame of animation to react to/input something. If the frame rate is not locked down, then you have timing inconsistencies which make it harder for someone to play. And since your graphical assets were all based around what frame rate you wanted to go with, you can't really change it after the fact because you have to update all of your graphical assets to deal with a different frame rate. This isn't really a problem with first person shooters because you're not basing anything on frames of animation, you're basing on when you see anything.

 

Also if you have a disjointed frame rate, you can have inconsistencies. If your physics updates slower than your graphics, then you can have a case where two objects appear to clip each other before the physics to calculate their trajectories takes place and suddenly they pop out. And if you tie the physics directly to the frame rate, you have issues with having data that's later than you should really be using and any deltas have to be recalculated.

 

lolsource: I worked on a flight simulator. Though I had the opposite problem: cycle rate was too slow for the physics thing in question to be handled effectively without hacks.

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23 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I can think of one: fighting games. Almost every fighting game as far as I know bases timing around which frame something happened at. And the reason is for consistency as players use a frame of animation to react to/input something. If the frame rate is not locked down, then you have timing inconsistencies which make it harder for someone to play. And since your graphical assets were all based around what frame rate you wanted to go with, you can't really change it after the fact because you have to update all of your graphical assets to deal with a different frame rate. This isn't really a problem with first person shooters because you're not basing anything on frames of animation, you're basing on when you see anything.

 

Also if you have a disjointed frame rate, you can have inconsistencies. If your physics updates slower than your graphics, then you can have a case where two objects appear to clip each other before the physics to calculate their trajectories takes place and suddenly they pop out. And if you tie the physics directly to the frame rate, you have issues with having data that's later than you should really be using and any deltas have to be recalculated.

 

lolsource: I worked on a flight simulator. Though I had the opposite problem: cycle rate was too slow for the physics thing in question to be handled effectively without hacks.

Interesting... one thing that comes to mind is another kind of game that is based heavily on timing: Guitar Hero/Rock Band

 

On consoles, this runs at 60 fps, but there have been a few ports and remakes of it for PC, most recently and notably, "Clone Hero".  It functions exactly the same way but has an unlocked framerate.  I cap it to 600, and it usually runs somewhere around 640 - 660, but the point is it's able to handle functioning the way it should even with an inconsistent framerate.  I feel like I'm missing something though in drawing a comparison, but I don't know what so if you have any ideas let me know

[asus killer]

On 12/3/2017 at 2:27 AM, DarkMesa said:

"Something like that is answered with a simple Google Search."

 

I have noticed that many games on my PC run well at 30 FPS (Games like FarCry 3 BD and F1 2014) while others feel barely playable (Such as The Witcher 2).

I remember reading something about this long ago but I can't find that Article anymore, after watching Linus' latest video on Tech Quickie about Minimum Requirements and stuff, I was really wondering if a game would play smooth on 30 or would be laggy as hell, is there a way to find that out? (Except watching Benchmark Videos on YouTube, my GPU isn't that used anymore so I don't always find video benches)

The Witcher was more NPC's, i guess that is the real difference. Taxes the CPU.

[Princess Luna]

If a game runs on perfect 30fps it will be smooth, if it is 30fps all time without any dips it becomes quite the cinematic feeling reason why it is smooth... issues is with a fluctuating fps all the way from 25~35fps all the time for example.

 

28 minutes ago, asus killer said:

The Witcher was more NPC's, i guess that is the real difference. Taxes the CPU.

Want a good example? try playing AC Unity with NPC set to ultra, I remember that being the very first game I saw maxing out on 100% my old i7 6700 depending the area the CPU actually bottlenecked my old TITAN X Maxwell back then... I couldn't believe it myself... Ubishit PC Ports are such a joke...

[Mira Yurizaki]

On 12/2/2017 at 6:27 PM, DarkMesa said:

I was really wondering if a game would play smooth on 30 or would be laggy as hell, is there a way to find that out? (Except watching Benchmark Videos on YouTube, my GPU isn't that used anymore so I don't always find video benches)

I should probably address this.

 

The answer is no. You can't exactly predict how software will run on your setup until it's actually run on your setup or similar.