just adding a genre that has not been mentioned here as being influenced by frame rate hiccups:
rythm games
“Normal” people playing them have a hard time dealing with (intentional) slowdowns/speedups during songs, and i guess that’s to be expected. Now, i am not into this genre, but playing on PC, surely some FPS variance is to be expected, and how do pro players take that on?
re dynamic frame rate idea @RT-55J
Vib Ribbon does that with the pre-loaded songs, also mirroring the slowdown visually in the jitter overlaying the screen, and it takes quite a while to adapt to that occuring during random songs you are playing....
Most FPS variance comes from players controlling the camera to view too much expensive stuff at once from some unexpected angle. Rhythm games have a fixed backdrop playing back only one thing, and some 2D foreground, so it’s no challenge to maintain good framerate. So pro players don’t have to worry about it.
Everything’s been said already, I was too slow for this thread
I guess I’ll just put my two cents in the “framerate can be a stylistic choice in videogames” even though I always prefer higher framerates… If busted is right and framerate helps you physically feel like you’re in the game or to make your representation in the game feel more comfortable to you then why not play with that aspect on purpose? There’s artistic merit in that. Potentially.
I love slow down in shoot 'em ups but that’s about it regarding unstable or low framerates.
What I do like - but that’s probably more common, with retro games and all that around - is lowering the resolution on certain games. Not to make them run smoother but because of the look. Best example was LA Noire. I could play it at 1080p on PC but I tried out 720p and I just loved the look of the actors’ faces at that resolution. It was totally… bizarre. Because the movements were so lifelike while the resolution was pixelated. It had such a nice, garbled flow to it. Also it probably reminded me of film grain that’s often seen in noire movies.
god i watched an episode of this cartoon The Dragon Prince the other night and it was the most boring stilted movement ever, like they completely omitted everything good about 2D and 3D both
Frame rate stability is as crucial in music games as it is in fighting games, and just like a professional SF player would immediately throw their setup in the garbage if it didn’t run at a consistent 60, so would any music gamer at a competitive level. Anything with a professional scene today is played on arcade hardware anyway, and that tends to greatly reduce the amount of tampering and inconsistencies that can happen compared to a PC environment where anything can be working in the background. The only place I’ve seen frame drops in music games in the arcade for the last decade have been in overambitious (given the hardware) menu screen transitions happening while things are loading in.
reading about this in tv reviews put me off of 4k tvs til they move past oled. paragraphs all about the deep blacks and colors yadda yadda and they’d throw in a line at the end mentioning oh yeah trying to watch actual movies at 24fps looks weird. I’m not going from a pioneer kuro to something where movie playback is worse. way to defeat the entire purpose of me even bothering with a nice television.
There was also a discussion somewhere else about responsiveness re: animations and I think that’s also informative to this. I suspect some of the frame rate policing (elsewhere) is more about perceived responsiveness due to a ton of reasons, but completely flattened to FPS.
Color really is so much better that I prefer movies shot on film on the new TV with worse motion; planning is not very distracting in anything but ultra-high contrast setups - space scenes, for instance. My comment was direct to games; films fare much better in this respect, as the non-Game Mode-picture settings spend 40ms or so cleaning things up subtly (no, I don’t have motion interpolation enabled).
Newer stuff on digital is dramatically better because the color palette is asking for more of the pop that the newer TV can provide. But that increased contrast can also exacerbate the motion issues.
I’ve still got the mid-range 2009 plasma set up on my bedroom and it still looks nice but for the first time I understand that cheesy line TV reviewers use when they say it pulls you into the movie – it’s really interesting to watch stuff I already know and have the image affect me differently.
Nothing is entirely perfect but I think plasma->OLED is a better tradeoff step than CRT->plasma was.
Some mess in a steam review about frame rate when they were really taking about animation is what inspired my original comment about these doofuses often not knowing what they’re even harassing developers about.
All I know is:
I get more consistent lap times in higher frame rate racing games.
Higher FPS in games feels more thrilling, more immediate and I seem to have a lower frustration threshold.
As someone who is made uneasy by live motion smoothing causing tearing and warping I feel like Id notice 24FPS artifacting on my OLED. I hope I’m not cursed to see it now.
Im really glad my friend decided to jettison his plasma recently. Its so very nice for racing due to the lower latency.
But yeah Im deff on the higher FPS, more consistent frame timing side of the line. I’d generally rather have less visual detail to get there.
If it looks or feels alright I’m usually OK with whatever.
Like a big thing recently was about how the PC version capped fatalities and other such cinematics in MK11 at 30 FPS, and moved to block mods that uncapped them until they made it an official toggle.
Which, OK! Cool that they opened that up! Except that those particular animations look weirdly fake and cartoony (well, as fake and cartoony as someone impaling someone’s head on a giant icicle can be) running uncapped.
I got the same vibe playing the Uncharted collection on PS4. Sure, it arguably feels more responsive, but watching Drake scale a wall at 60 FPS has some real Looney Tunes vibes, just the way his arms noodle out.
So I’m whatever on it. If it works and it feels OK, then OK! If it feels bad, hmm! Hope they can work that out!
Now screen tearing, though. Especially when it’s smack in the middle. That gets me.
As mentioned earlier in the thread, smooth frame-pacing is the essential thing for good game feel.
I’m bothered by how using framerate to time game state or check input is still a widespread practice. It remains a core assumption of most mainstream game engines, creating jank for no essentially good reason, especially in cross-platform or cross-generation ports.
The bugs usually show up when they use frames elapsed vs time elapsed e.g. in Titanfall they matched the duration of the vortex shield to framerate and it was shorter if you had a faster framerate; when Curse of Osiris launched, players with framerates above 60 would die going through the cannon to the public event islands because the velocity was lethal.
