SvennoJ said:
Alby_da_Wolf said:
SvennoJ said:
It doesn't add up while racing. You anticipate turns (and movements of other cars for that matter) You don't suddenly respond to them when they unexpectedly show up. When you're shaving off lap times, you get in the zone, it becomes like programmed behaviour. In the end you can almost do it with your eyes closed. That 16ms has nothing to do with setting better lap times.
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If you are alone on the track and if you know very well it, you can anticipate. If there are other cars and/or you haven't enough time to race on each track enough times to know it well enough, you'll have to do corrections at the last moment, and the same will happen each time you reach the car's road holding limits, if for any reason you'll have to force the car further due to other competitors unpredictable actions or simply making impossible to follow the ideal trajectory or if the car's limits decrease, due to the racing sim being accurate to the level of simulating changes of weather and temperature, tyre wear, etc. In these cases you'll be able to anticipate less and that additional lag will add up, the best that will happen is that if you'll anticipate as well as possible and need smaller corrections, most probably that lag will translate in a penalty on the lap time a lot smaller than 1:1 with the lag itself.
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Corrections at the last moment based on visual feedback won't benefit to any significant degree with the extra 16ms. It's still the anticipation of the flow of the game that determines that. Cars don't suddenly appear out of nowhere while racing.
Human lag > 215ms +
Input lag >= 66ms (Although your input will already have been taken into account a lot sooner than you see the result) +
Display lag 33ms to 66ms or more (lower in native 1080p game mode, higher when upscaling is involved)
The physics run independantly of the output framerate. While pushing your car to the limit you mostly rely on the sound the tires make. That has nothing to do with frame rate. Rumble also helps, also not tied to the framerate.
60 fps does look a bit nicer. Especially if motion blur has been added to 30fps visuals. Less motion blur will make the track easier to see at high speed. That's a design choice though, not part of the frame rate. Motion blur is mostly added to replays to give it a film like look, during racing it should be kept to a minimum.
60 fps is still too low for visuals, you still get that effect that the road, curb or fencing starts moving backwards at certain speeds due to the fixed granularity of the frame rate. Maybe a randomly variable frame rate >= 30 fps with NVidia's G-Sync could fix that. Only if you can accurately predict the time the next frame draw will take so you can eliminate judder effect. Ideally a game updates it's physics state slightly forward into the future so when the frame is displayed it matches the time code of the engine at that time. Judder happens when the game simply starts rendering the current state with disregard of when that frame might be shown.
Or you can go so high that the forward movement is always much less than any repeating elements on screen. It's eye candy anyway, to accuraterly follow the flow of the game 30fps without judder is enough.
In the end I can not detect any difference in my performance between Criterion's Burnout Paradise at 60fps and NFS Most wanted at 30fps. I did however notice that the game became a lot easier on PC at 1080p. I can see what's happening down the road!
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About the physics, never claimed anything else, even the 16yrs old GPL's physics engine runs at 288Hz.
About cars not suddenly appearing, that's true, but if they force you to abandon the ideal line, either because they commit an error when you're too close to perform a smoother anticipation, or just because they occupy the ideal line and you're faster, but they won't give you way, or if they suddenly have to slow down, making you reach them before when you predicted, then you are forced to perform less planned and quicker and dirtier corrections. In these cases, even if it's still true, as it always is, that human lag is overwhelming compared to the other lags, they still add up, although it's true that from a given frame rate on, even doubling it you'll have smaller and smaller benefits. From 60 to 120fps could cost you a fortune just to give you just a 8ms gain, and so on.
Anyhow, all this should be really noticeable only on the most hardcore racing sims, but Driveclub, like Burnout and NFS, is a sim-arcade hybrid, albeit not a toyish one, but one of the now quite common "simcades" with as high accuracy as it's possible without crossing the border with a real sim, so I can agree with you that in this case 30fps should be enough.
While I still think that in purer sim racers higher framerate is important, I can agree that in EVERY case it also gives better visuals, being smoother particularly in motion and I also agree that having a smooth 30fps without judder, jitter or other irregularities is in most cases the most significant improvement, that should be pursued and achieved before anything else.
Also, since the beginning, I made my comparison considering all the other variables and parameters unchanged: fans of a well known simcade always bragged about its 60fps, but it was achieved halving the maximum number of car in a race compared to its most renowned competitor, and the increased accuracy its higher framerate could in theory allow was wasted in more than one way, as the tracks were modeled too large, and that already made it easier, and the grip was unnaturally high, further easing it and making that higher framerate unnecessary, if not to just better visuals in motion.
About eliminating visual artifacts in motion, interesting that trick of the variable frame rate (always keeping a good minimum one), I didn't know it, or maybe if I heard about it I didn't pay attention (CG is not my field, I only followed an introductory computer graphics course many years ago, when M$ mole Rick Belluzzo still hadn't helped sinking Silicon Graphics).
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