Why do low framerates *feel* so much worse on modern video games?


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?

in reply to Count Regal Inkwell

My favorite game of all time is Descent, PC version to be specific, I didn't have a PlayStation when I first played it.

The first time I tried it, I had a 386sx 20MHz, and Descent, with the graphics configured at absolute lowest size and quality, would run at a whopping 3 frames per second!

I knew it was basically unplayable on my home PC, but did that stop me? Fuck no, I took the 3 floppy disks installer to school and installed it on their 486dx 66MHz computers!

I knew it would just be a matter of time before I got a chance to upgrade my own computer at home.

I still enjoy playing the game even to this day, and have even successfully cross compiled the source code to run natively on Linux.

But yeah I feel you on a variety of levels regarding the framerate thing. Descent at 3 frames per second is absolutely unplayable, but 20 frames per second is acceptable. But in the world of Descent, especially with modern upgraded ports, the more frames the better 👍

in reply to Count Regal Inkwell

@Count Regal Inkwell Most people can't honestly perceive any change in their visual field in less than 1/60th of a second except perhaps at the very periphery (for some reason rods are faster than cones and there are more rods in your peripheral vision) and even then not in much detail. So honestly, frame rates above 60 fps don't really buy you anything except bragging rights.
in reply to binom

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Nanook

 — (Shoreline, WA, USA)
@binom If you film with a camera with a ntsc vertical reference rate of 59.95 hz you will see a beat note between the lights and the led lighting indicating it is not well filtered if at all. If you have a newer HiDef camera, most of them work at a 24Hz refresh rate, that IS a slow enough rate that you see jitter in the movement, they also will have a beat note if recording under most LED lights. Many cheap led lights just have a capacitive current limiter and that's it. If you power them off of 50Hz you will see the flicker, if you get dimmable LED lights they will NOT have a filter. But I don't want to interfere with anyone's bragging rights.