(Dr.) Bottlenecks: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Just Buy the

[centy]

Yeah I can notice without an fps counter General Septem.

 

I was going to make a point about grand theft auto 3 which limits fps to 30 but found this on wikipedia..

 

 

Frame rates in video games

 

Frame rates are considered important in video games. The frame rate can make the difference between a game that is playable and one that is not. The first 3D first-person adventure game for a personal computer, 3D Monster Maze, had a frame rate of approximately 6 fps, and was still a success, being playable and addictive. In modern action-oriented games where players must visually track animated objects and react quickly, frame rates of between 30 to 60 fps are considered minimally acceptable by some, though this can vary significantly from game to game. Most modern action games, including popular first person shooters such as Halo 3, run around 30 frames a second, while others, such as Call of Duty 4, run at 60 frames a second. The framerate within most games, particularly PC games, will depend upon what is currently happening in the game in the way of CPU occupying.

 

A culture of competition has arisen among game enthusiasts with regards to frame rates, with players striving to obtain the highest fps count possible. Indeed, many benchmarks released by the marketing departments of hardware manufacturers and published in hardware reviews focus on the fps measurement. Modern video cards, often featuring NVIDIA or ATI chipsets, can perform at over 160 fps on graphics intensive games such as F.E.A.R. One single GeForce 8800 GTX has been reported to play F.E.A.R. at up to 386 fps (at a low resolution).[citation needed] This does not apply to all games: some games apply a limit on the frame rate. For example, in the Grand Theft Auto series, Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City have a standard 30 fps (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas runs at 25 fps) and this limit can only be removed at the cost of graphical and gameplay stability. It is also doubtful whether striving for such high frame rates is worthwhile. An average 17" monitor can reach 85 Hz, meaning that any performance reached by the game over 85 fps is discarded. For that reason it is not uncommon to limit the frame rate to the refresh rate of the monitor in a process called vertical synchronization. However, many players feel that not synchronizing every frame produces sufficiently better game execution to justify some "tearing" of the images.

 

It should also be noted that there is a rather large controversy over what is known as the "feel" of the game frame rate. It is argued that games with extremely high frame rates "feel" better and smoother than those that are just getting by. This is especially true in games such as a first-person shooter. There is often a noticeable choppiness perceived in most computer rendered video, despite it being above the flicker fusion frequency (as, after all, one's eyes are not synchronized to the monitor).

 

This choppiness is not a perceived flicker, but a perceived gap between the object in motion and its afterimage left in the eye from the last frame. A computer samples one point in time, then nothing is sampled until the next frame is rendered, so a visible gap can be seen between the moving object and its afterimage in the eye. Many driving games have this problem, like NASCAR 2005: Chase for the Cup for Xbox, and Gran Turismo 4. The polygon count in a frame may be too much to keep the game running smoothly for a second. The processing power needs to go to the polygon count and usually takes away the power from the framerate.

 

The reason computer rendered video has a noticeable afterimage separation problem and camera captured video does not is that a camera shutter interrupts the light two or three times for every film frame, thus exposing the film to 2 or 3 samples at different points in time. The light can also enter for the entire time the shutter is open, thus exposing the film to a continuous sample over this time. These multiple samples are naturally interpolated together on the same frame. This leads to a small amount of motion blur between one frame and the next which allows them to smoothly transition.

 

An example of afterimage separation can be seen when taking a quick 180 degree turn in a game in only 1 second. A still object in the game would render 60 times evenly on that 180 degree arc (at 60 Hz frame rate), and visibly this would separate the object and its afterimage by 3 degrees. A small object and its afterimage 3 degrees apart are quite noticeably separated on screen.

 

The solution to this problem would be to interpolate the extra frames together in the back-buffer (field multisampling), or simulate the motion blur seen by the human eye in the rendering engine. When vertical sync is enabled, video cards only output a maximum frame rate equal to the refresh rate of the monitor. All extra frames are dropped. When vertical sync is disabled, the video card is free to render frames as fast as it can, but the display of those rendered frames is still limited to the refresh rate of the monitor. For example, a card may render a game at 100 FPS on a monitor running 75 Hz refresh, but no more than 75 FPS can actually be displayed on screen.

 

Certain elements of a game may be more GPU-intensive than others. While a game may achieve a fairly consistent 60 fps, the frame rate may drop below that during intensive scenes. By achieving frame rates in excess of what is displayable, it makes it less likely that frame rates will drop below what is displayable during stressful scenes.

 

 

I admire the work you have done creating these threads Thraxz (I still havn't read the second thread yet) but no amount of graphs are going to alter my perception of gaming, and that's what this age old argument boils down to, whether you can perceive a difference or not. And yes, I can.

[General Septem]

i cant, but i can tell when the the fps drasticly change between speeds.

 

should'nt eneything above 25fps be smooth eneyway? films run at 25fps dont they?

 

They do, but if you pause a movie you can see that every frame is obviously not clear. There's motion blur, and that tends to smooth it out. 25 crisp frames per second is going to look a lot choppier.