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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."
The problem really has nothing to do with how many frames the human eye can see in a second. As was almost implied by the previous reply, it has a lot more to do with your monitor's refresh rate at a given resolution. If your monitor is at 60hz, you're not getting more than 60fps whether your card puts it out or not, because the monitor isn't going to draw them (this is why v-sync is good for games, but is disabled for benchmarks, where the monitor shouldn't have any influence on the test).
;)
Obviously, capping the framerate was the easiest way for id to solve this particular problem, and 60 fps is generally accepted as good enough. Anyone that thinks it isn't probably hasn't played many games capped at a certain framerate (for instance, you can cap your framerate in Half-Life and many other games). Once it's capped at a certain rate, it limits the possibility for severe slow-downs when framerates drop on complicated scenes. This is the real reason that having a card that plays 200 fps on the latest game (besides the obvious issues with previous Quake games) is important, because the higher average values mean higher values for the lowest framerate in a round. If you're playing with an average of 100 fps and the game slows to 60 fps, it's going to feel like it's crawling, but if you're playing at 60 fps and it drops to 50 fps you might have trouble even noticing it. If it never drops, even better
In the end, at least they've done something to address a problem typical with their past engines. I wish they had found a more elegant solution that allowed individuals to choose higher framerates without affecting the gameplay, but something's better than nothing. The only people that will complain are the ones that spend most of their time staring at fps counters while they play or benchmarking their graphics cards with the latest demos. Maybe some people will finally figure out that their games would be more playable if they capped their framerates at a reasonable level rather than trying to buy faster hardware and tweaking their systems all day to acheive a 100fps average that gets slammed to 30 fps every time 5 people are on the screen at once.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Translation:
Our engine is wicked fast because we calculate everything with integer math. Our physics engine runs at a rate fixed according to time, not machine cycles, so that any computer fast enough for the game will run the physics exactly the same as any other machine, and so integer math round-off errors will be consistant, and can be made up for in the map design.
We chose to fix the frame rate to the same rate as the physics engine so that video cards will not be re-rendering the same frame twice. If they did, then the game would appear jumpy.
If you run at 72fps, and the engine runs at 60, then you'd get a duplicate frame every 5 real frames. Since the controls are tied to the physics engine, the controls would feel laggy 12 times a second, until the frame rate again caught up with the engine.
The optimal setup will have the monitor set to 60Hz, or perhaps a higher frequency that is some multiple of 60Hz, but will result in quick beats: rather than 1 in 5, choose 90Hz so every third frame is a duplicate, or best choose 120Hz.
Or just turn off the flourescent lights. You want a terrifying experience anyway - who wants to play with the lights on?
-Adam