The Framerate Police

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TotalBiscuit has created a new Steam group called The Framerate Police. According to the page, the group is dedicated to finding and labeling PC games that are capped at 30 frames per second so you can see them at a glance and also mention if it is possible to unlock the framerate by other means.
 
I like it. Nothing is worse than a PC game capped at 30fps with no way around it. Underwater slideshows FTL.
 
This group only matters if it lists games that can't be uncapped via .ini or .cfg tweaks. Disney's Split Second was perma-capped at 30fps on PC I believe, but I can't think of too many more that were truly locked, but I play more console than PC these days, has it become this huge scourge on the platform or something....?
 
And the list of games, shows 5 per page and it's a click fest to look through them ... need to start a group "clickfest police" :D
 
There are some companies that lock at 30FPS for cinematic reasons. But I would think it's safe to say it's mostly because the companies do not want to, or cannot, optimize their games.
 
Spore was one. Supper annoying because, besides that, I actually sort of liked it (or parts of it).
 
Some developers also choose to work with a game tickrate locked to 30 FPS, with the end result being that physics go wonky if the game runs faster than 30 FPS.

Re-evaluating every physics-reactive element of a game to enable variable framerate is kinda difficult..
 
Unknown-One said:
Some developers also choose to work with a game tickrate locked to 30 FPS, with the end result being that physics go wonky if the game runs faster than 30 FPS.

Re-evaluating every physics-reactive element of a game to enable variable framerate is kinda difficult..
Click to expand...

The game developers shouldn't have made that choice in the first place. Back in the i496 days we had that turbo button to cut CPU performance basically in half to deal with software that was written so badly as to not perform correctly on modern hardware. That was back in the mid-1990's. There is no fucking excuse for that shit in 2015. Any developer that does that isn't worth a damn and needs a history lesson in PC gaming.
 
NV drivers let you lock the GPU to run at half refresh rate which is great for keeping a laptop's internals cooler. It's not as important in a desktop, but with the majority of PC sales being mobile hardware, capping at 30 seems totally reasonable to balance performance, power, and heat situations. IDK about most people, but I don't like hearing laptop cooling fans have to go to their maximum speed so if a developer is implementing a 30 FPS cap, I'm okay with it. Anyhow, this is something that shouldn't cause any drama at all. People get upset over the strangest stuff.
 
HeadRusch said:
This group only matters if it lists games that can't be uncapped via .ini or .cfg tweaks. Disney's Split Second was perma-capped at 30fps on PC I believe, but I can't think of too many more that were truly locked, but I play more console than PC these days, has it become this huge scourge on the platform or something....?
Click to expand...

According to TB, the games listed includes one that can be uncapped, and will tell you how to uncap it if that is the case.
 
If you have a reason to cap a game at 30fps, that is your right as a developer. You are stupid and I don't want to buy your product, but that's your right.

It's also my right to know this before I give you money.
 
Yeah, I watched his video the other day talking about this. Great idea. I was not too shocked at the sheer number of games that are 30 FPS capped. Thankfully some can be unlocked. But even then some games might have issues with being FPS unlocked. Crazy.
 
DoubleTap said:
If you have a reason to cap a game at 30fps, that is your right as a developer. You are stupid and I don't want to buy your product, but that's your right.

It's also my right to know this before I give you money.
Click to expand...

There is no reason to cap the game's physics to 30FPS. That's just retarded and short sighted. They may target 30FPS on consoles as a performance metric because they often feel that this gives them the ability to provide the best visuals the consoles have to offer while leaving the game playable.
 
bigdogchris said:
There are some companies that lock at 30FPS for cinematic reasons. But I would think it's safe to say it's mostly because the companies do not want to, or cannot, optimize their games.
Click to expand...

"Cinematic reasons" is a BS excuse...TB addresses that in his video about this curator as well.

Really happy to see this in FPN, and will be the first curator I follow as well.
 
How many of you have played titles on this list (on the PC of course) and didnt notice?

Well not notice till now.
 
Unknown-One said:
I never said they should have. I agree, it's a disastrous decision.
Click to expand...

Earthquakes and hurricanes are disasters. Setting the framerate to a max of 30 in a video game is not at all significant and it's friendly to hardware that has to operate in like really small spaces with limited cooling.
 
Elf_Boy said:
How many of you have played titles on this list (on the PC of course) and didnt notice?

Well not notice till now.
Click to expand...

Most, if not all games that I have played that are capped to 30. It's immediately noticeable.
 
HeadRusch said:
This group only matters if it lists games that can't be uncapped via .ini or .cfg tweaks. Disney's Split Second was perma-capped at 30fps on PC I believe, but I can't think of too many more that were truly locked, but I play more console than PC these days, has it become this huge scourge on the platform or something....?
Click to expand...

It matters regardless many people don't know how to uncap something or go digging through config files. And why should they have to?
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Earthquakes and hurricanes are disasters. Setting the framerate to a max of 30 in a video game is not at all significant and it's friendly to hardware that has to operate in like really small spaces with limited cooling.
Click to expand...

<insert analogy about muscle car that is limited to 30mph>
 
Elf_Boy said:
How many of you have played titles on this list (on the PC of course) and didnt notice?

Well not notice till now.
Click to expand...

It is impossible not to notice if you care about it, and if you don't care about this then you just don't have to follow the Curator.
 
bigdogchris said:
There are some companies that lock at 30FPS for cinematic reasons. But I would think it's safe to say it's mostly because the companies do not want to, or cannot, optimize their games.
Click to expand...
"Cinematic" reasons... Did you know that movie projectors actually show each frame 3 times, making effective framerate of a 24 FPS movie in a theatre actually shown at 72 Hz? This is done because the pulse width of the projector light at 24 Hz causes visible flicker, making the film appear to judder and jump around to the human eye. The 24 FPS standard is ancient in film, going back to the 1920s. It hasn't changed because people have come to accept it over such a long period of time, and production companies are all too happy to stay with it to save money on film stock which itself costs a pretty penny. Regardless, you cannot compare film framerate to video game framerate.

DoubleTap said:
If you have a reason to cap a game at 30fps, that is your right as a developer. You are stupid and I don't want to buy your product, but that's your right.

It's also my right to know this before I give you money.
Click to expand...
The only reason a game would be locked to a framerate is due to laziness of the developer, asset creators, or both. Why spend development time syncing the game engine when you can simply force updates at a fixed rate? I saw this post by someone claiming to be a developer. I could not stop rolling my eyes the entire time, and the replies were eating it up. The comment on a button press alone taking up to 100ms of processing time had the eyes rolling so hard that I though they were going to detach from my retinas.

I don't have a lot of experience programming games, but it is not hard using math to predict and update the engine in the time between frames. One of the games I worked on had no issues running fine at 1000 FPS or 20 FPS simply because we were correctly calculating rendering and physics changes between updates. On a single thread, no less.

Elf_Boy said:
How many of you have played titles on this list (on the PC of course) and didnt notice?

Well not notice till now.
Click to expand...
Anyone who says this has not seen the difference between actual games running at 30 FPS compared to 60 or higher. The judder at 30 FPS is unbearable. I can't play Arkham Knight locked to 30 because my eyes will strain and constantly water after 10-15 minutes.

temujin987 said:
i play in cinematic 24 fps.
Click to expand...
You joke, but here is a bonus choice reply from the above thread. A user doesn't know what a keyframe is and reverses the effect of projector refresh rate in his armchair explanation.
OEQuoteThrawanAweg said:
Actually, moving objects in (2D) animated films usually move at 16 or sometimes even at 8 FPS.
From Wikipedia:
even high-budget theatrical features such as Studio Ghibli's employ the full range: from smooth animation "on ones" in selected shots (usually quick action accents) to common animation "on threes" for regular dialogue and slow-paced shots.
​
(In this case, "on ones" means 24 FPS and "on threes" means 8 FPS.)
The idea of "smoothness" is simply a lot different in film and in video games. Because in a video game the visuals have to respond to player input you need a much higher framerate for the experience to feel smooth (or even tolerable - just imagine playing games at 16 FPS).
Click to expand...
 
TheHobbyist said:
<insert analogy about muscle car that is limited to 30mph>
Click to expand...

<response containing a comment about how everyone has to follow the same traffic laws no matter what they own accompanied by a snarky remark questioning the size of the aforementioned muscle car owner's reproductive organs and questionable mental state for willfully endangering innocent people around them>
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Earthquakes and hurricanes are disasters. Setting the framerate to a max of 30 in a video game is not at all significant and it's friendly to hardware that has to operate in like really small spaces with limited cooling.
Click to expand...
It's significant in that a lot of people consider 30 FPS to be unplayable.

A game that can ONLY run at unplayable framerate = I want a refund.
 
Domingo said:
I like it. Nothing is worse than a PC game capped at 30fps with no way around it. Underwater slideshows FTL.
Click to expand...

Agreed!

That being said, having a default fps cap (maybe a little higher, like 60 or 120fps) which can be overridden by the user makes lot of sense.

No point in a game using power and creating heat by rendering more frames than are really needed.

As I recall Valves source engine had a frame rate cap that could be set with the console command fps_max, but I think the default was 300 or something like that
 
Unknown-One said:
Some developers also choose to work with a game tickrate locked to 30 FPS, with the end result being that physics go wonky if the game runs faster than 30 FPS.

Re-evaluating every physics-reactive element of a game to enable variable framerate is kinda difficult..
Click to expand...

That's a load of bollocks. I worked with a fellow modder by the name of Fourier and adapted code that a fellow named Haste had put together to fix the framerate dependent movement behavior in Quake 3 Arena. Anyone that's played Q3 seriously knows that 125 FPS is the "sweet spot" for player physics. The code we developed not only removed the need to run at 125 FPS it replicated the 125 FPS behavior at any framerate, and also if the framerate was not constant. You can run from 20 to whatever - I've tested up to 500 - and you can make every crate jump and perform every circle jump. Fourier is a Defrag player and we tested this on trickjump maps. It runs flawlessly.

Other reason it's bollocks? Every calculation for a physics-dependent behavior can be derived from a real-time equivalent, and the client's displayed framerate does not have to be synchronous to the server's frame rate. How do I know this? It's already been done and has been ever since Quakeworld. If you're playing a non-client/server game you can still code the physics logic to run on an independent internal timer and run the rendering clock at whatever the hell you want. A game with 30 FPS logic would generate 30 snapshots a second. All the client has to do is process these and either interpolate or extrapolate any physics calculations in between server frames. Again, this has already been done. I've been all through the physics code in Quake, Quake 2, and Quake 3 Arena. All you have to do is process a list of linked entities, move them through the world from "oldTime" to "newTime", and render the position and angles based on interpolated math. If a physics interaction occurs it will show up in the next snapshot so you process that - a bounce, explosion, something stopping against another object, etc - at the time the server said it happens.

There's NO excuse for framerate dependent behavior in this day and age. The only reason it happened in the Quake series was due to position data being rounded up or down to integers because dialup modem connections could not handle full floating point values being sent out 20 times a second. Framerate dependent behavior on a modern PC game is lazy coding, PERIOD.
 
The Framerate Police they live inside my PSU.
The Framerate Police they come to me in my CPU.
The Framerate Police they bottleneck my SSD, oh no!
 
quake 3 is a horrible example because it actually supports *his* claim of physics and frame rates. The reason quake 3 magic number 125 fps is used is to fiddle with the physics of the game...not because it doesn't have an effect
 
Meh, I checked the list, there really isn't anything on the list that would bother me being at 30fps. Nearly every one of the games is older than dirt, a port that I wouldn't have played anyways, or an indy platformer.
 
mope54 said:
quake 3 is a horrible example because it actually supports *his* claim of physics and frame rates. The reason quake 3 magic number 125 fps is used is to fiddle with the physics of the game...not because it doesn't have an effect
Click to expand...

You didn't get it.

They did exactly a decoupling of an engine that although variable had the framerate married to the physics, so the only thing left to do on the 30fps fixed games after a decoupling is just to take out the "brakes" for the rendering side of the engine.

The decoupling is the hard part, the putting on or off the brakes to the rendering shouldn't be hard in comparison.
 
Revdarian said:
You didn't get it.

They did exactly a decoupling of an engine that although variable had the framerate married to the physics, so the only thing left to do on the 30fps fixed games after a decoupling is just to take out the "brakes" for the rendering side of the engine.

The decoupling is the hard part, the putting on or off the brakes to the rendering shouldn't be hard in comparison.
Click to expand...
No, I think you don't get it.

They decoupled the framerate from the physics so that the physics could run at whatever wonky speed they wanted to. They didn't actually decouple it and make it work at the speed the developers wanted it to, which would be the difficult part.

He doesn't know what is or isn't broken, only that he that the things he tested seemed to "work" (but ignoring that the increased fps helped people make those difficult jumps, not the other way around).
 
Phoenix333 said:
That's a load of bollocks. I worked with a fellow modder by the name of Fourier and adapted code that a fellow named Haste had put together to fix the framerate dependent movement behavior in Quake 3 Arena. Anyone that's played Q3 seriously knows that 125 FPS is the "sweet spot" for player physics. The code we developed not only removed the need to run at 125 FPS it replicated the 125 FPS behavior at any framerate, and also if the framerate was not constant. You can run from 20 to whatever - I've tested up to 500 - and you can make every crate jump and perform every circle jump. Fourier is a Defrag player and we tested this on trickjump maps. It runs flawlessly.

Other reason it's bollocks? Every calculation for a physics-dependent behavior can be derived from a real-time equivalent, and the client's displayed framerate does not have to be synchronous to the server's frame rate. How do I know this? It's already been done and has been ever since Quakeworld. If you're playing a non-client/server game you can still code the physics logic to run on an independent internal timer and run the rendering clock at whatever the hell you want. A game with 30 FPS logic would generate 30 snapshots a second. All the client has to do is process these and either interpolate or extrapolate any physics calculations in between server frames. Again, this has already been done. I've been all through the physics code in Quake, Quake 2, and Quake 3 Arena. All you have to do is process a list of linked entities, move them through the world from "oldTime" to "newTime", and render the position and angles based on interpolated math. If a physics interaction occurs it will show up in the next snapshot so you process that - a bounce, explosion, something stopping against another object, etc - at the time the server said it happens.

There's NO excuse for framerate dependent behavior in this day and age. The only reason it happened in the Quake series was due to position data being rounded up or down to integers because dialup modem connections could not handle full floating point values being sent out 20 times a second. Framerate dependent behavior on a modern PC game is lazy coding, PERIOD.
Click to expand...

What this man said.

So much BS in these threads.
 
Thanks for sharing this information. This actually got me to start using Steam's curator feature.

I don't mind editing config files, but if there's no any way to uncap the fps without breaking the game, or at all, then I'd rather not play it.
 
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