| Torillian said: Out of curiosity does anyone have any clue on the standard refresh rate for physics engines in most games? I've no idea if 240 is exceptional though I have to imagine it's on the high end since the developers thought to mention it and this is a pretty simple game that's hugely dependent on physics. |
Most modern physx enabled cards can handle 20 billion instructions per second, which for a game like this would be solely applied to water physics and object physics rather than extensive game wide physics, as such 20 billion instructions on a modern pc gpu would equate on a game such as this to around 700fps precision, dropping to 300-400 on other types of games, dropping further still down to fixed frame (one calculation per video refresh) on open world sandbox games employing a physics model.
To put it bluntly, 240fps resolution on physics modeling for a game like this isn't really a huge deal, i suspect its only being calculated and trumpeted for marketing purposes due to the kerfuffle of framerates and resolutions currently rife in the industry media at current, underlined by their focus on advertising the texture resolution and native video resolution too.
Frankly, if they dropped the physics precision down to 60fps and locked video to 60fps you would see very little difference because you're still getting a calculation per each of the frames that calculation have an effect anyway. Extremely high calculation resolution is only really needed for high volume solid collision calculation where you are dealing with a vast number of objects and need to have room to emplament anomaly detection (basically, to prevent glitches in physics).
In games with low physics precision and no anomaly detection you get situations where an object moves between two fixed points repeatedly every other frame because its at rest position is stick between two frames of calculation and without the detection this remains unresolved.
Tumble for PlayStation 3 used more or less the same physics resolution as Art of Balance will use for WiiU, for the record, and Super Rub'a'dub, used over 400fps on it's water physics.
