Debunking The Need For 200FPS

Digital_Fusion writes: "If you follow the gaming sites at all you will hear about people that have tweaked their gaming rigs to give 200fps in games like Quake3. Do we really need this kind of framerate? Well no, according to this paper. It seems that anything over 72fps is just wasted as our visual pipeline is saturated past that point." On the other hand, I'm glad that companies make it possible to show crazy-fast framerates, for the trickle-down effect of cheaper "normal" cards.

Comments

Re:Average frame rate isn't the issue

[Seumas]

Playing Q3 in 1024x768, trilinear, high-detail, full quality everything, I peak at 130fps on my 64MB Radeon and 150fps on my 64MB GeForce Ultra2.

In the midst of battle with body parts and rockets flying everywhere (clarification: my body-parts; someone elses rockets), my rate easily drops down to 90fps. Very rarely, I'll catch it plummeting as low as 70fps or 60fps. I can't really tell any difference between 70fps and 150fps, but anything below about 60fps is noticable to varied degrees.

As long as you can still aim and shoot fluidly, you're fine. Anyone who is still moving fluidly at the heaviest point of graphic intensity shouldn't worry about tweaking every last frame out of their system. Unless there is some revolutionary change in the industry, I don't plan to upgrade my cards for a long time to come (until we see games that drop my frame rate enough that I can notice it). I'm certainly not about to dump a few hundred more on a card just because I can achieve 200fps, when 150fps will more than do.

Besides, what is more irritating is the games with the poor net framework that makes finding a fast server impossible. While Q3's code seems to be sleek (I usualy find a lot of servers averaging between 12 and 30 ping), other games (Unreal Tournement, to name one) rarely have anything below 100 and only a few under 200 ping. Even the sweetest frame-rate can't help poor network performance.
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seumas.com

But that is only the average FPS that is over 200

[Sanchi]

While on my gameing computer i average 70 FPS there are times that i drop to well below 20 during hard effects (like 5 bodies being gibbed at once). The goal of hardware tweakers is to get the maximun effects while not droping below that critical point of 60 ftp (or 72 as that article clames).

And I promise that i can tell the difference between a computer avereging 72 FPS and 200 FPS.

Sanchi

Frame Rendering and Game Cycles

[LionKimbro]

60/72 Hz is what we want when we play games, but you generally have to target above that for when your potentially viewable set (PVS) changes dramatically- if you move *really* fast (missile cam), say, or if you just turn your head 90 degrees (and look down a completely different hallway).

A current trend in games is to seperate the rendering cycle from the simulation cycle.

Historically, games have been implemented with a read-eval-print loop like this:

1. read user input for a given cycle
2. evaluate what happens next
3. display the result

Now, we (FPS, 3D) seem to be moving towards the parallelization of read/eval (simulation) cycles and the print (display) cycles. That way they can be controlled independently: The display can be given just the cycles it needs to provide 60/72Hz, and simulation lives in it's own space. The display routines have their own prediction mechanisms to make sure that they can keep pace.