the framerate line: get on a side

What’s up with internet people obsessing over what frame rate games run at?

This seems like audiophile stuff but with an even shakier understanding of exactly how things work.

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what’s the videogame/framerate equivalent of audio cable risers?Cable%20Risers

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I guess I’m missing the context here, because a game that runs at 30fps certainly feels different than one that runs at 60fps? Are we talking about marginal high frame rates? Like 120 vs. 144?

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right, and games that don’t maintain steady framerates are harder to play.

i feel like that’s the extent of the framerate stuff i’ve seen?

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I find different titles suit different rates
If it’s a twitchy competitive realtime exercise, or leaning aesthetically Sporty, I want the fastest most stable, most videoreal update rate I can get, I don’t really care about mood or whatever. This is where your audiophile-like moans are coming from, and I think they’re fair enough

If I’m doing something single player and going for the whole Cinematic gimmick, something closer to movies’ 24FPS seem way more appropriate, 60FPS will actually seem cheap and weird in those circumstances

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there are a lot of people who seem extremely pedantic about 30 vs 60 when it’s like, a game maker thing that is perfectly fine at 30 and which the creator obviously never worried about

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Digital foundry and that guy that died mostly.

Don’t want to get an inferior experience!!

So we are clear I cannot tell the difference between 30 and 60 and that is a gift.

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Yeah, I fall on the Brooks side here; if it’s an action-oriented or competitive thing, then framerate matters a ton because 1) inconsistent framerate leads to unpredictable inputs 2) FPS is inherently tied to input delay, so lower FPS games feel swimmy.

I’m okay with 30fps for stylistic reasons or if the game is built with 30fps in mind.

That audiophile stuff is literally imperceptible, but I can look at any game and instantly tell if the framerate is closer to 30, 60, or 120, so I don’t think that comparison is fair.

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When a 60 fps game is suddenly running at 30 fps (like with multiplayer in Mario Kart 8) I notice and care, but otherwise not really.

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I’d like a display that can sync to silent film rips the person went out of their way to remove the duplicate frames from

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I don’t think the stylistic argument in favor of ‘cinematic’ frame rates is valid in games, for two reasons.

Primarily, games in which the player is operating a character or cursor function by creating a virtual proprioceptive sense, the sensation of ‘body awareness’, with this icon. While your biological proprieception can’t be said to have a universal clock rate, we can certainly say that it operates much more finely than 100 ticks per second.

The more responsive the game feedback mechanism, the closer the game is to being an extension of the player’s body and to minimizing the body awareness hurdles.

Second, games aren’t rendered like visual recordings. Film and photography are collecting photons for a period of time, so each frame of a film has a built-in blur encoding that time slice. A game renders discrete steps along the way. Game footage is inherently disconnected from itself in a way film isn’t, and looks significantly less smooth than film when running at the same frame rate. Newer tricks like motion blur go some distance to resolving this, of course.

Interestingly, an OLED TV’s extremely fast pixel-response time is normally considered advantageous for games, as it represents fast motion better. But on low-frame-rate content, it creates visible stutter artifacts, as the brain perceives a succession of still images, rather than a somewhat-blurred, and thus-blended, series. 30fps games are rough-looking on my OLED screen in a way they weren’t on my old plasma display, which has a constant electronic snow pattern if you look closely at the image.

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Games run at the frame rate they run at. Deal with it.

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Should’ve said, 30FPS with blur is the ideal
Playing the remaster of SotC at 60FPs was smooth but tonally felt off

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I’ll die first

No, you deal with it, I’m gonna play Zelda in Cemu until the physics break and avoid ladders in Dark Souls like they’re mimics.

I said more of this in GYPT but hiccups in games make me want to jump out of my skin so I turn all of the image quality things down on my personal computer videogames. When I’m playing a game with a smooth high refresh rate and fluid controls it is much easier to get in a flow state. My favorite part of VR is that smoothness is mandatory to avoid motion sickness.

I’m surprised that some of y’all aren’t into this kind of visual fidelitly - like @Rudie I know you as a Sega fan from listening to the podcast and I think the foundation their arcade feel is smoothness. I don’t get the hate for Digital Foundry or others appreciating good engineering in a game or wanting to play smooth-running games. It must be a thing I like with bad associations.

I hope the general target for 3D games is 60 with new Ryzen-based consoles and adaptive refresh in HDMI 2.1.

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Digital Foundry usually goes a bit over my head because they’re so tech savvy and I’m not, but I find them extremely important because everyone else on youtube kinda sucks at talking about tech. I’m also a little bit framerate sensitive and it can bother me a lot, though it’s a case by case basis sometimes (SotC? Terrible. Star Fox SNES? Appropriate to the style.)

I can sympathize with people getting some form of nausea or disorientation from significant frame hiccups, especially since in high school I couldn’t play Mother 1 without spasming at battle transitions.

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yeah digital foundry go in the anandtech bucket of “crucially competent and readable, even though most people who obsess over this stuff are kind of awful”

I agree with busted that the filmic comparisons are empty but I also totally get why 30fps with a heavy postprocess is normal for single player stuff and don’t mind at all. I played games on shitty computers for years and I can live with it, but I’ll echo that I can easily distinguish 30 from 60 from 90+ and it’s a nice to have. frame drops rarely bother me; I don’t really do flow state.

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sub-60 fps should be illegal.

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a game swimming around the mid-40s is completely tolerable to me whereas watching a rip of a movie with messed up frame timing is totally unacceptable

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Oh, it’s worth noting for the console/non-tech folks

There’s a technology called “adaptive sync” (branded freesync and g-sync) that synchronizes the refresh rate of the display to the rate at which the GPU can draw each frame. This makes sub-optimal framerates much more pleasant and eliminates screen tearing without adding input latency like v-sync. This tech will be built in to the next HDMI standard next year.

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