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id Says 60fps Is Enough For Doom III
Dot.Com.CEO writes "IGN PC reports that the final version of Doom III will be capped at 60fps, quoting John Carmack as saying 'A fixed tic rate removes issues like Quake 3 had, where some jumps could only be made at certain framerates'. Will this put a stop to fans arguing whether there is a tangible benefit for frame rates over 60fps? What do Slashdot Games readers think about id's decision?" Elsewhere, there's a new preview of Doom III at C+VG, including a mini-interview with Carmack in which he comments: "Now's where it goes from being an interesting demonstration of all the technologies to being a fabulous game, and that really does all happen at the end."
No problems here. I don't think that I can differentiate between 60 FPS and 120 FPS...although I'm no expert.
It seems like this will fix the issue addressed in the post, and it may mess with some benchmarks that will use Doom III (anandtech, tomshardware, etc)...however, I'll bet that you will be able to turn the rate-limiting off for benchmarking purposes. Otherwise, there will most likely be no noticable effect.
-Turkey
Quake 1 NetQuake (not quakeworld) was capped at 72 fps. Since QW, Q2 and up does client-side movement/prediction, this has been an issue on the client.
The thing that players need to worry about is MINIMUM FPS. During a firefight, there will be more elements to draw, and hence a longer render time. Having this drop below your framerate cap is a bad thing.
The issue with jumps being variable depending on ticrate has been a problem in Quake1 days too. In NetQuake, it was only the server ticrate which mattered. Today with client-side prediction, its the clients too.
This just makes me say to id: fix your damn physics model! Why should the jump distance be dependant on ticrate?! Some weird quantization errors you have there.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Your monitor's refresh rate is different than the games internal clock. So you can definitely increase the refresh rate on your monitor past 60. There'll just be a bunch of duplicate draws.
I was wondering when some game maker was going to decided to cap the fps rate and concentrate on other things. We are close to the point where the computers we play these games on will all be able to exceed the 60 fps limit. (thank you Mr. Moore) By not having to draw more frames then 99% of the pop can see, the game can focus on gameplay, and as a side effect, eliminate slowdowns affecting the # of fps outputted, say when everyone in the room gets fragged by someone suiciding with a big grenade. Hopefully by seperating the drawig routines from the world model, better gameplay can result. By doing this, certain 'cheats' can be implemented, such as lowering resolution durring high speed turns or objects speeding by at high speed. The old burred fence post trick. Your eye cannot see any details on the fence post as wou wiz by it at 60 mph, so why bother drawing all the details on it. A similar trick was used in
- Who Framed Rager Rabbit.
in the scene where Bob Hoskins character was driving the cartoon car, and turned a 90 degree corner quickly. This was done by splicing two pieces of film together, and then hand drawing a approximation of Mr. Hoskins in for the few frames that were impossible to film in real life. The human eye would have detected the few frames that he has missing if they hadn't done this, but cannot detect the replacement of a live human by an animated figure for this short ammount of time.As I said before, it was only a matter of time before someone did this as drawing something people cannot see is a wast of resources. The next limit I can see would be the number of polys displayed, more or less for the same reason, putting any more on the screen would be wasted because no one could see them. I cannot make a guess about when this will happen, but we will probably be talking about it within 10 years.
Just a tip. The 9200 series are actually WORSE than the old 8500. They are also Direct X 8 series cards, not 9. Spend a bit more on a Radeon 9600 (non pro), it'll last for longer. Otherwise, a Geforce4 4200 would be an excellent choice instead of the 9200. AVOID the low 9000s Radeons.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
True,
But with quake3 at least, you want to be running at least 125fps with vsync turned off so you can nail your strafe jumps. There are some jumps and other movement oriented things you simply can't do as well unless the game is running at 125fps or higher. I'll take some tearing for some frags.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Here's the thing: The "refresh rate" of the human eye is about 15Hz. It's not really fair to call it a refresh rate since different parts of the eye transmit light level changes at different rates (faster in your periphial vision). It's just that on average, the cones and rods in your eyes take about 60ms to "settle".
Of course, the eye isn't taking snapshots, over this 60ms you're sort of summing the incoming light over the entire period, and transmitting the "average".
Thus, we see everything with motion blur pre-attached. Our brains and optical centers are wired to use that blurring to reconstruct the missing motion. Also used in the reconstruction: the fact that different parts of your eye can update independantly, so you have this distributed stream of information coming in whenever, and your brain is assimilating all of it and using all of it (including differences in timing) possible to get the best representation.
Okay, so then clearly, we need really high framerates because our eyes are not cameras telesynced to the monitor... we need to have the pixels as accurate as possible at every time because we never know when a cells in a region will want to transmit. We "figure out" that we are seeing stop frame animation, even if you saw the "snapshots" of the eye, it still would look somewhat blurred and layered. This is the brain postprocessing outsmarting our technology.
Easy fix? You can use a lower framerate if you add the blur. This is why we can sit through movies at 24 FPS, or TV at 30, since the recording equipment is averaging it for us. Of course, we can still sense the "syncronous" nature of the screen updating, especially when comparing camcoder stock at 60fps and movie stock at 24.
But you don't need to update the screen nearly as fast. 60fps with motion blur is about as realistic as one could ever hope for. Have you seen HDTV football broadcasts! My god!
So if Doom supports capping the output framerate at 60fps, but internally allows motion blurring by rendering at twice that followed averaging, I don't think you'll notice it at all. As far as your eyes are concerned, you're screaming at 120.
The one thing I think is a bad thing is that they chose 60. If this is vsynced on an analog monitor (necessitating a 60Hz vert refresh), it kind of sucks. I can "see" the refresh on lots of monitors at 60, but it goes away at 70. I'm sure many of you know what I mean.
I'd rather them cap it at 70, or 72. With 72 v. ref. you could update the screen at 24fps, tripling each frame, but rendering 3-6 frames when possible to create the blur.... LIKE WATCHING A REALTIME MOVIE. When it gets busy, just cut the number of frames you average.
That would be fricking cool.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON