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?

  • Crozekiel@lemmy.zipEnglish
    101·
    24 hours ago

    Part of it is about how close you are to the target FPS. They likely made the old N64 games to run somewhere around 24 FPS since that was an extremely common “frame rate” for CRT TVs common at the time. Therefore, the animations of, well, basically everything that moves in the game can be tuned to that frame rate. It would probably look like jank crap if they made the animations have 120 frames for 1 second of animation, but they didn’t.

    On to Fallout 4… Oh boy. Bethesda jank. Creation engine game speed is tied to frame rate. They had several problems with the launch of Fallout76 because if you had a really powerful computer and unlocked your frame rate, you would be moving 2-3 times faster than you should have been. It’s a funny little thing to do in a single-player game, but absolutely devastating in a multi-player game. So, if your machine is chugging a bit and the frame rate slows down, it isn’t just your visual rate of new images appearing that is slowing down, it’s the speed at which the entire game does stuff that slowed down. It feels bad.

    And also, as others have said, frame time, dropped frames, and how stable the frame rate is makes a huge difference too in how it “feels”.

      • Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.socialOP
        1·
        2 hours ago

        Yeah it’s actually around the 30s (or 60s, depending on whether you consider interlaced frames to be ‘true’ or just ‘halves’)

        A CRT television runs at 60Hz because it uses the alternating current from the wall as a reference, but in every half cycle it only actually draws half of the image. “60i” as they call it.

        So you can say it’s 60 interlaced frames a second, which is about comparable to 30 progressive frames.