Pgr3 with only 30 Frames/s.....

He obviously means the framerate has to be locked within 2 months, which is a reasonable time table...

 

That 2 month claim is ridiculous. you can be fixing bugs that are causing the frame rate to belower then is should right up until it's complete. Which is precisely why they said it would be foolish to give out framerate numbers at this point.

 

reaching a consistant near-locked 60 FPS should be Bizzare's number 1 focus now.

I would rather have 60 FPS most of the time (95%) with some occasional dips than have 30 FPS overall.

 

Could someone explain to me, why games on console the fps are usually locked in? It would seems that a majority of games clock is running off the fps. Isn't it just a simple to run it off a realtime clock instead?

 

If I recall correctly, this is called certification.

.Sis

 

FPS are locked because that is what is preferrable when playing any sort of game. For a racing game or any type of game where the environment is moving around at a fast pace the higher frames per second the better. A sustained 60 fps is the best because it has no dips in framerates or slowdowns. A jittery framerate is very annoying when playing a game and pretty much takes away the feeling of being "in" the game.

 

I've always wondered what the technique is for "locking" the fps. Is there something that the engine is synching up with? How does it know it's running fast (I'm presuming running too slow is not addressable)?

I did a very brief, lazy search, so if the answer is, "search harder", that's fine. But if someone has a quick answer I'd be interested to hear it.

.Sis

 

Okay, that makes perfect sense...well sort of. Why on the PC, I (and I'm assuming others, too) don't notice fluctuation in frame rates unless they dip down really low? But I guess it's just me...

In the olden days, there isn't a lot of different timer interrupts you can hook your code onto, so it was easy to hook onto the screen refresh; and you don't have to worry about threading your game...It was one big code block. Gosh, how time have changed, huh?

Nowadays, you have different interrupts firing up different threads to do different things for you. You have a thread to handle what screen redraws (in essense you can lock this to a particular frame rate), one to do the all the world events (and ai, game logic and whatnot), one to handle the inputs...Eh, I haven't coded a console game in my life...Maybe I should defer this to someone who has! ahhahahaha silly me.

 

Some people nay not care about framerate on PC games but that is something that is unbearable to me. I'd rather have a locked in 60 fps then one that wavers from around 40 - 80 fps. That's just too much. PC games also have to go for many different specs of machines. We have the ability to make the framerate relatively stable at either a sacrifice of image quality or doing expensive upgrades. I care about image quality but performance is much more important. It's also a reason I think console games do much better than PC games in general when comparing sales. No need to worry about all the little nuances that happen.

 

I had Amiga and not PC, so I never learnt to tollerate jerky frame-rates It's was always fun going round my friends and he'd fire up the latest game (with an hour or twos config.sys and autoexec.bat editing to get the damned thing to work...) and we'd see jerky and low frame rates. That might be why on some PS2 games I can say 'hey, this has some pretty bad frame rate drops' and my PC-raised buddy replies 'really? I didn't notice.'

That's one of the main reasons I like consoles. I like the idea of closed hardware so devs can provide a stable, uniform system, and fix the framerate. Unfortunately they don't do this and some games offer very noticeable FPS drops. As an example of where frame rate matters to visuals, recently I've been playing Kingdom Hearts and that has a dire framerate, and then Lego Star Wars which runs beautifully smooth and looks really nice with it. I would rather developers drop some fo the shaders and whatnot to provide a smooth 60/50 fps, but as we all know frame rates dont matter in static screenshots...

Also on PC games (NWN and GW) I tend to drop all the quality settings to get a stable 60 fps. It hasn't worked yet and I go with medium frame rate:eye candy ratio, but it does annoy me.

 

Anyway to get this thread semi-back on topic ...

What is the point of that though when you are only being relayed the feedback 30 times a second

60fps should be standard for all racing games next generation. The difference between 30 and 60 fps in a racing game is noticable.

 

Full Auto X360

 

Sonic wrote:

I agree, one title that comes in mind is MP. While i thought Halo was better as a game for me atleast/probably because MP was a little to hard for me/ but the fluid in the motions in MP is really great and i think its a great example of a 60fps game.

 

Well, the main reason for locking the fps in the first place is so that we end up generating a frame buffer on time for the screen refresh (which on NTSC TVs is typically 60 Hz interlaced).

In the old days of DOS, you had the ability to query the status of device registers that corresponded to screen refresh. Usually, something that looked like ( mov dx,3dah \ waitRetrace: mov al, 8 \ test dx, al \ jnz waitRetrace ) -- on a side note, I feel glad and rather weird that I actually remembered that. Also, many of us took the route of overwriting the software interrupt for screen refresh such that it would copy off from a pre-allocated screen buffer, which allowed us to continue working on computations for the next frame instead of waiting for the refresh time (in addition, we often played sound on these interrupts, which is why if the machine crashed, the sound would still play continuously all the way through w/o skipping).

Nowadays, though, it's just a wait for appropriate amount of time to pass until the refresh takes place. It's essentially a gigantic noop.

 

"Your eyes can deceive you, don't trust them." —Obi-Wan Kenobi

The idea is that to play a video game at a high level you need to anticipate what's going to happen. You are playing the game inside your mind a second or so ahead of the actual displaying of the results. I'm not saying that I wouldn't perfer 60fps, of course I would. It's just that if I had to choose, I'd choose controller responsiveness over display rate. That being said, dipping under 30fps is very annoying, where as dipping under 60fps is hardly noticable.

 

That's the biggest pile of rubbish I've come across in a long time. Regardless how high the frequency of the controller refresh rate is (controller responsivness), your brain and ultimately your input going to the controller is limited on the amount of visual feedback you are receiving. A game where the display rate is at half the Hz is naturally going to give you half the visual feedback. There's an upper limit in which the human eye can distinguish those intervals - 30 Hz isn't it.

 

Don't get wrapped up in the notion that everything should be 60fps come next generation... especially when the majority of PS3 games and XBox360 games will likely end up being 30fps. Though it is more important to reduce the degree of lag and slowdown that does occur in games instead of trying to get the game to run at 60fps WITH slowdown or lag.

Image Quality/Complexity > Frame Rate (though to a certain degree)

 

Pal is 25 fps.That's getting low.That's in the poor range of framerate ,IMO.30 is still average,60 is good.

 

Says who? Just because you like looking at screenshots and look at pretty things instead of actually playing the games, doesn't mean that IQ is more important than framerate for everyone.
Remember, IQ does nothing to enhance the gameplay, however framerate is sometimes invaluable, and in general is a big part of gameplay.

Graphics are definately important, but they should never ever come first, against something as important as framerate.

 

Framerate is extremely important when it comes to graphics. A game running at 30 fps and having a wavering framerate will be worse in motion than a game with a waering 60 fps. 30 fps is acceptable but not desirable in the least. Console games or PC games do not have the built in motion that regular film has so it has to compensate for higher framerates. 60 fps is relatively smooth and that game will feel and look much better in motion at 60 fps than 30 with a bit higher IQ. That is the important part.

If anyone remembers during the Dremacast era a certain game called Sonic Adventure came out. Well the game itself was not at 60 fps but during one of the mini game (it was a race of some sort) it ran at 60 fps and the end result was that after the race was over and it reverted back to a somewhat jittery framerate it was awful.

Framerate should be put above and beyond a pretty picture. I'd rather have 60 pretty pictures than 30 of them on my screen.