Like I’m not one of THOSE. I know higher = better with framerates.
BUT. I’m also old. And depending on when you ask me, I’ll name The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask as my favourite game of all time.
The original release of that game ran at a glorious twenty frames per second. No, not thirty. No, not even twenty-four like cinema. Twenty. And sometimes it’d choke on those too!
… And yet. It never felt bad to play. Sure, it’s better at 30FPS on the 3DS remake. Or at 60FPS in the fanmade recomp port. But the 20FPS original is still absolutely playable.
Yet like.
I was playing Fallout 4, right? And when I got to Boston it started lagging in places, because, well, it’s Fallout 4. It always lags in places. The lag felt awful, like it really messed with the gamefeel. But checking the FPS counter it was at… 45.
And I’m like – Why does THIS game, at forty-five frames a second, FEEL so much more stuttery and choked up than ye olde video games felt at twenty?
It’s a few things, but a big one is the framerate jumping around (inconsistent frame time). A consistent 30fps feels better than 30, 50, 30, 60, 45, etc. Many games will have a frame cap feature, which is helpful here. Cap the game off at whatever you can consistently hit in the game that your monitor can display. If you have a 60hz monitor, start with the cap at 60.
Also, many games add motion blur, AI generated frames, TAA, and other things that really just fuck up everything. You can normally turn those off, but you have to know to go do it.
If you are on console, good fucking luck. Developers rarely include such options on console releases.
30 50 30 60 30… Thats FPS… Frametime means the time between each frame in this second.