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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Digital Foundry complains about Mario Kart 8 dropping to 59 FPS.

TechnoHobbit on 24 May 2014

The first part of this thread is a perfect example of the fact hardly anyone reads the article in a OP lol (and the same thing happened on every single forum I'm part of.. kinda depressing).

Anyway hopefully it gets patched. Knowing me the repeating frame and the blip it makes will annoy me a little.



Bets:

1. If the Wii U sells closer to 10 million LTD by 1/3/2015 I win. If it sells closer to 9.5 million LTD by 1/3/2015 OfficerRaichu15 wins (winner gets 2 weeks of avatar control)--Lost.

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bigtakilla on 24 May 2014
the-pi-guy said:
bigtakilla said:

Passed college algebra. And that's my point, for every one secong, you'll have two frames that equal 1/30 of a second.

Which means for that period of time, it would be equivalent to 30 fps.  



Yes, and it would occur every second, not two.

hsrob on 24 May 2014

If this affects anyone's purchase or enjoyment of this game then I am truly sorry for them. Digital Foundry again proving their value.

edit: To be fair to DF, someone chose to focus on that part of the article, nevertheless I'm not particularly fond of DF's reason d'etre.



ICStats on 24 May 2014
curl-6 said:

*Facepalm*

Anyone who says they can tell a one frame difference at 59-60fps is a Jedi or a liar.

Not to mention most "60fps" games have drops into the 30-50fps range. (Ps3/360 COD)

Not true... when something runs buttery smooth 60fps (actually 59.94) and then misses 1 frame periodically every second you can notice that mild jank.

It is very odd... because 59 vs 60 is below a 2% difference.  As this is happening consistently, it is likely not a performance limitation, but a bug.  I hope that Nintendo could realize and address it, unless it's actually a hardware timing issue.  Whatever frame timer they are using is either slightly too slow or slightly too fast.  Has anything like this been reported for other Wii U games?



My 8th gen collection

MikeRox on 24 May 2014
think-man said:
Way to picky, it's one frame! who cares lol I wouldn't have even mocked it if it dropped to 40fps every now and then. It's hard to find a console game that stays at 60fps all the time.


Sadly true, but it didn't used to be that way :(

I just hope it's not as noticable as the 50hz conversions used to be, particularly on Dreamcast (Sonic Adventure 2 was awful for it) 60fps game running at 50fps then skipping to catch up because it was dropping behind. 1 frame should be way less noticible than what must have been about 10fps skipping. I'm hoping I can forget this happens before I play the game so I don't notice it.

I know it seems trivial to most, but a lot of the time you can see this stuff. Heck I noticed that Rayman 2's animation on Dreamcast was half that of the games frame rate which gave it a strange look.



RIP Dad 25/11/51 - 13/12/13. You will be missed but never forgotten.

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Dr.Henry_Killinger on 24 May 2014
Conegamer said:

Cannot be unseen, eh?

Sounds like nitpicking at it's very finest. Sure it's a little concerning but it's one repeated frame. It'll never impact anyone at any time, surely.

Thread title is misleading



In this day and age, with the Internet, ignorance is a choice! And they're still choosing Ignorance! - Dr. Filthy Frank

IamAwsome on 24 May 2014

So does this mean the game will flop and Nintendo will lose E3?



globalisateur on 24 May 2014
the-pi-guy said:

This is what is happening with Mario Kart's frame rate.  

The first second is 60 frames.  

The second second is 59 frames.  

Then the next 14 frames are all 59 frames.  

Then the 17th second, will be 60 fps again.  

As the occurence of duplicate frames are 64n/60.  n being an integer, the first duplicate frame is at 64/60th seconds, the second is at 128/60th seconds.  A little bit larger than 2 seconds.  

The actual frame rate in this case is 59.0625 frames per second.  

For most of that period, it is a solid 60 fps.  But then for 2 periods of 1/60th of a second it shows the same frame. This means that it effectively drops to 30 fps every 64n/60th seconds.  

Probably not very noticable.  But it might be to some people. 


Not noticeable until you see it for the first time.

After that it's constant stuttering and very noticeable. you can't unsee it!

 

The problem is not the average ~59.5fps or so but the constant micro-suttering, every ~1 second there is judder/stuttering so it seems it's never smooth.

Even if Tomb Raider DE has an average of 52fps during heavy action scenes, the game is maybe still locked at 60fps like ~80% of the time and never stutter during those moments like when you are exploring etc, butter smooth.

COD ghosts for instance maybe runs at locked 60fps 99% of the time and stutters maybe like once every ~few minutes or so, depending of the version and level..

MK8 stutters 100% of the time. and is never 60fps locked on the SP versus AI. If you can't see the stuttering, good for you. But once you take that road...You'll be soon very eager to play on those future adaptative-sync monitors...



dahuman on 24 May 2014
the-pi-guy said:
globalisateur said:
the-pi-guy said:

This is what is happening with Mario Kart's frame rate.  

The first second is 60 frames.  

The second second is 59 frames.  

Then the next 14 frames are all 59 frames.  

Then the 17th second, will be 60 fps again.  

As the occurence of duplicate frames are 64n/60.  n being an integer, the first duplicate frame is at 64/60th seconds, the second is at 128/60th seconds.  A little bit larger than 2 seconds.  

The actual frame rate in this case is 59.0625 frames per second.  

For most of that period, it is a solid 60 fps.  But then for 2 periods of 1/60th of a second it shows the same frame. This means that it effectively drops to 30 fps every 64n/60th seconds.  

Probably not very noticable.  But it might be to some people. 


Not noticeable until you see it for the first time.

After that it's constant stuttering and very noticeable. you can't unsee it!

 

The problem is not the average ~59.5fps or so but the constant micro-suttering, every ~1 second there is judder/stuttering so it seems it's never smooth.

Even if Tomb Raider DE has an average of 52fps during heavy action scenes, the game is maybe still locked at 60fps like ~80% of the time and never stutter during those moments like when you are exploring etc, butter smooth.

COD ghosts for instance maybe runs at locked 60fps 99% of the time and stutters maybe like once every ~few minutes or so, depending of the version and level..

MK8 stutters 100% of the time. and is never 60fps locked on the SP versus AI. If you can't see the stuttering, good for you. But once you take that road...You'll be soon very eager to play on those future adaptative-sync monitors...


It's a duplicated frame every second, 15 seconds out of every 16 seconds.  I mentioned that in the post you quoted.  

The game will be 60 fps every 1 + 16n seconds.  The first second will be 60 fps, then the 17th second will also be 60 fps, etc.   

It'll probably be fairly noticeable.

They can patch it but I'm wondering if they are even aware of the bug, it's a good thing DF caught on to it, now we just have to see what Nintendo does with it. Sounds like a simple timing issue.



curl-6 on 24 May 2014
fluky-nintendy said:
Why Nintendo lies constantly about resolution? 

They never lied. Nintendo never said it was 1080p.