Total Biscuit: The Great Framerate Non-Debate

[Intrinsic]

I disagree with the framerate nonsense. especially with the whole more is better BS that most people will wanna have us believe.

I believe that there is a minimum amount of frames needed to make a game "responsive". You know, for there to not be a discernible perceivable difference between input and out come. And then the other side of this equation is that whatever said framerate is, it must be "consistent".

Responsive and consistency. Those are the two single most important things to framerates in games. For responsiveness, that depends on the genre of game you are playing. But the minimum should be 30fps. Certain genres, will be better at 60fps but not "need" to be at 60fps.

And with consistency, it actually surprises me that a lot of people that seems to talk about framerates never mention this. An unstable or inconsistent framerate is the technical equivalent of running a game at an overall lower average frame rate. And is most noticeable as judder. But why this is bad is that our brains adapt to the response times required for whatever game we have been playing only to have it suddenly go from running at 75fps to running at 40fps. It is beter to run a game ALL THE TIME at 30fps over a period of 20secs than to run it at 60fps and 50fps intermittently over a period of 20secs at 2 second intervals. That will look horrible.