01011001
Banned
READ THE FUCKING POST BEFORE POSTING NON-ARGUMENTS PLEASE.
This thread is inspired by some of the comments I read in this thread:
where people talk about playing old games that ran at super low framerates, and having no issues with that...
An I too am one of them, I even just recently played through Disaster Report on XBSX2, a PS2 game that has a 20fps lock, and even drops below that 20fps lock in some scenes...
I had no issues playing it... but why do I hate 30fps in modern games, when I play 20fps retro games just fine?
The quick explanation would be:
1: Framerate is not the issue.
2: Input lag, and visual noise is.
Modern games feel worse at low framerates than older games.
Example: Star Wars Jedi Survivor at 30fps feels way worse than Ocarina of Time at 20fps.
and the reasons for this are mainly how modern engines work and how modern games are rendered.
But I will elaborate on these a bit, otherwise what an OP would this be?
First of all, input lag:
Many modern engines have an insufferable amount of input lag, all while the games aren't designed with them in mind either.
Unreal Engine is especially bad with this, but is by far not the only one... God of War's current engine has the same issue, as does Cryengine and many others.
They don't inherently have these issues, but the way almost all developers use them is the issue, as they rely on many of the default way these engines read inputs, render images and Vsync games.
Ocarina of Time on N64 had less input lag at 20fps, than almost any modern game has at 30fps... and for some even the 60fps modes have higher input lag than 20fps Ocarina of Time... this is not an exaggeration, it's absolutely true.
And this is not down to modern TVs either, in fact, if you have a modern Samsung TV from the last 2 production years for example, and you play at 120fps on it, your Input Lag of your Screen is lower than the latency of a CRT... because yes CRTs also have input lag, this lag comes from how they draw an image from top to bottom 60 times each second, which means 1 image takes 16.6 ms to be drawn by a CRT, input lag is measured at the center of the image usually, meaning a CRT given those standards would have input latency of at least 8.3ms of input lag. While a modern 120hz Samsung TV has ~5ms of input lag... and about 9ms at 60hz.
The CRT Input Lag problem basically has ben solved now, we are so close to that even on TV screens now that it's not a factor anmore, let alone on high end PC monitors.
And this increase in latency isn't only obvious when comparing super old games to super new games.
New games still have a shitload of variation, with games like Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2/Warzone 2.0 having input lag so low, that they compete with old SNES games!
We are talking ~40ms of latency at 60fps, and below 30ms at 120fps, which is lower than most 8 and 16 bit games ever dreamt of reaching.
We could compare some Xbox 360 games that ran at 30fps to some modern games that run at 60fps, and Halo 3 would win... God of War Ragnarök at 60fps funnily enough has about the same latency as Halo 3 at 30fps, which is around 90ms for both (+/- 5ms)
So even tho there are modern games that absolutely crush it when it comes to latency, like Call of Duty, and there are of course old games like Killzone 2 that were infamous due to their high latency, it's sadly a pattern that latency is going up.
We are now in a spot where a bulk of modern titles have the same, or even more Input Lag than Killzone 2 had, a game that was panned at the time for how awful the aiming feels due to it's lag.
Coming back to God of War Ragnarök. That game in its 30fps Graphics Mode, has an input latency of around 170ms. Killzone 2's latency was in the 150ms ballpark!!!
So let that sink in for a moment... during Gen 7, Killzone 2 got massive bad PR for having 150ms of latency... and a modern game like God of War Ragnarök easily exceeds that!
Meanwhile Halo 3 had 90ms of latency at 30fps on an Xbox 360, and Ragnarök has about the same amount of latency in its 60fps Performance Mode.
In God of War's case it's mostly the Vsync that is the issue it seems, since as soon as you use the unlocked VRR mode that deactivates Vsync, the latency shrinks down to 90ms, in par with Halo 3 and the 60fps Vsync mode of the game.
Why does Vsync introduce input lag? Because it pre-renderes (buffers) frames. And some games take this to another level, usually to smooth out framerates due to being extremely demanding on the GPU, and they will hold multiple frames in the back buffer before displaying a new one, which gives them the possibility to basically have a fallback frame under most circumstances, which keeps the percieved framerate consistent at the cost of input lag.
Sea of Thieves in fact is the only game I know of that actually lets the user chose how many frames it should pre-render.
Secondly, how games build their final image:
Modern games have tons of high frequency details, and modern games are expected to be played on high resolution displays.
These 2 factors are the reason many games now use aggressive TAA, and more and more games use one of the many forms of Upsampling to higher resolutions from a lower base resolution.
These 2 things both lead to the same issue, a muddy and hard to parse image in motion.
Then a third factor comes in, MOTION BLUR *scary thunder noises*
And Motion Blur adds even more visual noise and muddies the final image even more.
So a modern game will often look pristine and super clean when you hold your camera completely still, but as soon as your character, and especially the camera, moves at all... MUD AND SMEARING.
And funnily enough we have an old game as an example here again, that at the time got a lot of flak for having the same issues, that nowadays are so common that noon even really talks about them in reviews or anything anymore...
And that game is Halo Reach.
Halo Reach was an early example of a game that used a form of Temporal Anti Aliasing... TAA.
And TAA at the time Halo Reach was made, was still firmly in its infancy, exhibiting a lot of issues and visual noise. So if you stood completely still in Halo Reach, it looked GLORIOUSLY smooth and clean... move the camera and it was a jittery mess.
These days TAA got a lot better, but it still has issues with ghosting and clear fizzle and disocclusion artifacts the moment something on screen moves.
But of course, TAA isn't the shiny new thing anymore... we now have FSR2, TSR and many other proprietary methods by different developers...
And these Upsampling methods basically bring bag almost all the issues Halo Reach had, and then some!
When you play Ocarina of Time at 20fps on an N64 connected to a CRT, motion is clean! You can see motion clearly, there's no artifacts from anything moving too fast, there is no blur to reduce legibility of the action happening around you, and there's no motion blur to try to make it seem smoother than it is.
"but why is this a 30fps problem mister Y" is what you are now asking I bet!
WELL, TAA, FSR2, TSR, CBR, ADD UPSAMPLING METHOD HERE... and Motion Blur, all of these rely on image data from previous frames!
THE LESS IMAGE DATA, THE MUDDIER THE IMAGE IS IN MOTION!
So, at 30fps these modern upsampling and anti aliasing methods have less temporal data available to them to create their final image!
A game running at 1440p FSR2 Quality Mode will look sharper and have less artifacts when running at 60fps than it would have at the same settings but locked to 30fps.
So the lower the framerate, the more "smear" the more "mud" and the more "fizzle" there is.
So in the end, all of this adds up.
The Motion Blur, the Image Reconstruction, the Antialiasing, all of it get worse the lower the framerate is.
This is why Jedi Survivor in motion looks like this (I purposefully took a shot from a spot where the game locks to 60fps to give it the best chances):
and F-Zero GX like this (I'm turning sharp left here to give it the worst chances with fast camera and vehicle movement):
Normalized for same image size so you don't have to zoom as much on mobile (not zoomed in in any way, just cropped)
And the lower the framerate, the worse all the weird grainy, blurry, fizzle, artifacts you see in Jedi Survivor will get. Meanwhile if you ran F-Zero GX at 10fps, it would look literally the exact same in terms of image quality and artifacts (because it has no artifacts)
And we haven't even touched motion blur, which is off in my screenshot here, along will all the other image filters.
If a game like Jedi Survivor runs at a lower framerate, the amount of data the engine has to draw the image from one frame to the next is reduced, the image gets less readable and muddy, and you will see blur in motion, even tho motion blur is off.
Smaller issues that aren't technical but due to Art Design of games:
Older games have different considerations when it comes to art (textures, models, scale) than modern games.
Older consoles couldn't have as much detail than newer consoles can handle. This means textures had less "visual noise", meaning there is less for your eyes to get hung up on, less to process for your brain.
In motion, when running through a level, or turning a camera, this means the things that are important, or could be important, as well as your general environment, is easier to digest.
You will have an easier time knowing where enemies are, or where a button or rope is, when it's simpler in design, bigger in scale and stands out more. And all of these features are features older graphics had!
On a wall with a simple flat texture, no shadows or reflections, seeing a red button that is on top of that unrealistically big in scale, is easier to see than a red button with realistic scale, on a wall with detailed textures, shadows of adjacent objects on it and other lighting applied.
So even if older games had the graphical issues I explained above, the simpler graphics would still make it way easier on your eyes, because there is not as much small detail that can get lost in all the blur, fizzle and breakup.
In short: Less Detail + Scale = Easier to read environments even at low framerates.
SO IN CONCLUSION:
Playing a game like Ocarina of Time will need getting used to at first, but once your eyes are adjusted to the 20fps output, the image will look pretty decent and clean.
Playing Jedi Survivor at 60fps already makes the whole image look muddy and blurry due to the artifacting of the upsamling. At 30fps this will only get worse, add Motion Blur to negate the stutter and you'll see barely anything in motion.
Playing Ocarina of Time at 20fps on real hardware will feel... not amazingly responsive, but more responsive than many modern games like... Jedi Survivor... or Redfall... or God of War Ragnarök feel at 30fps, hell some of them even at 60fps!
So you can not use an old game and point the finger at it saying "LOOK! back then we had no issues with this! this also ran at a super low framerate!", while not taking into account how modern game engines work, how they react to player input, and how they construct their final output image.
Old games had simple graphics, they were easier to parse by your eyes because important stuff was exaggerated in scale and shape, they didn't have motion blut, no reconstruction artifacts, no TAA or Screen Space effects that lag behind and take time to accumulate data. They had simpler engines with less latency.
And that is why they look cleaner and play better at low framerates than new games.
And yes, there are modern games and old games that are outliers from this. Like some modern ones like From Software games have pretty low latency, and some old games like Mortal Kombat on GameBoy have massive amounts of lag.
And some old games had weird fake motion blur which made the image hard to read, while some modern games have clean images with barely anything to muddy them in motion.
The difference is that there are more of the less good examples today, and more of the good examples in the past.
This thread is inspired by some of the comments I read in this thread:
where people talk about playing old games that ran at super low framerates, and having no issues with that...
An I too am one of them, I even just recently played through Disaster Report on XBSX2, a PS2 game that has a 20fps lock, and even drops below that 20fps lock in some scenes...
I had no issues playing it... but why do I hate 30fps in modern games, when I play 20fps retro games just fine?
The quick explanation would be:
1: Framerate is not the issue.
2: Input lag, and visual noise is.
Modern games feel worse at low framerates than older games.
Example: Star Wars Jedi Survivor at 30fps feels way worse than Ocarina of Time at 20fps.
and the reasons for this are mainly how modern engines work and how modern games are rendered.
But I will elaborate on these a bit, otherwise what an OP would this be?
First of all, input lag:
Many modern engines have an insufferable amount of input lag, all while the games aren't designed with them in mind either.
Unreal Engine is especially bad with this, but is by far not the only one... God of War's current engine has the same issue, as does Cryengine and many others.
They don't inherently have these issues, but the way almost all developers use them is the issue, as they rely on many of the default way these engines read inputs, render images and Vsync games.
Ocarina of Time on N64 had less input lag at 20fps, than almost any modern game has at 30fps... and for some even the 60fps modes have higher input lag than 20fps Ocarina of Time... this is not an exaggeration, it's absolutely true.
And this is not down to modern TVs either, in fact, if you have a modern Samsung TV from the last 2 production years for example, and you play at 120fps on it, your Input Lag of your Screen is lower than the latency of a CRT... because yes CRTs also have input lag, this lag comes from how they draw an image from top to bottom 60 times each second, which means 1 image takes 16.6 ms to be drawn by a CRT, input lag is measured at the center of the image usually, meaning a CRT given those standards would have input latency of at least 8.3ms of input lag. While a modern 120hz Samsung TV has ~5ms of input lag... and about 9ms at 60hz.
The CRT Input Lag problem basically has ben solved now, we are so close to that even on TV screens now that it's not a factor anmore, let alone on high end PC monitors.
And this increase in latency isn't only obvious when comparing super old games to super new games.
New games still have a shitload of variation, with games like Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2/Warzone 2.0 having input lag so low, that they compete with old SNES games!
We are talking ~40ms of latency at 60fps, and below 30ms at 120fps, which is lower than most 8 and 16 bit games ever dreamt of reaching.
We could compare some Xbox 360 games that ran at 30fps to some modern games that run at 60fps, and Halo 3 would win... God of War Ragnarök at 60fps funnily enough has about the same latency as Halo 3 at 30fps, which is around 90ms for both (+/- 5ms)
So even tho there are modern games that absolutely crush it when it comes to latency, like Call of Duty, and there are of course old games like Killzone 2 that were infamous due to their high latency, it's sadly a pattern that latency is going up.
We are now in a spot where a bulk of modern titles have the same, or even more Input Lag than Killzone 2 had, a game that was panned at the time for how awful the aiming feels due to it's lag.
Coming back to God of War Ragnarök. That game in its 30fps Graphics Mode, has an input latency of around 170ms. Killzone 2's latency was in the 150ms ballpark!!!
So let that sink in for a moment... during Gen 7, Killzone 2 got massive bad PR for having 150ms of latency... and a modern game like God of War Ragnarök easily exceeds that!
Meanwhile Halo 3 had 90ms of latency at 30fps on an Xbox 360, and Ragnarök has about the same amount of latency in its 60fps Performance Mode.
In God of War's case it's mostly the Vsync that is the issue it seems, since as soon as you use the unlocked VRR mode that deactivates Vsync, the latency shrinks down to 90ms, in par with Halo 3 and the 60fps Vsync mode of the game.
Why does Vsync introduce input lag? Because it pre-renderes (buffers) frames. And some games take this to another level, usually to smooth out framerates due to being extremely demanding on the GPU, and they will hold multiple frames in the back buffer before displaying a new one, which gives them the possibility to basically have a fallback frame under most circumstances, which keeps the percieved framerate consistent at the cost of input lag.
Sea of Thieves in fact is the only game I know of that actually lets the user chose how many frames it should pre-render.
Secondly, how games build their final image:
Modern games have tons of high frequency details, and modern games are expected to be played on high resolution displays.
These 2 factors are the reason many games now use aggressive TAA, and more and more games use one of the many forms of Upsampling to higher resolutions from a lower base resolution.
These 2 things both lead to the same issue, a muddy and hard to parse image in motion.
Then a third factor comes in, MOTION BLUR *scary thunder noises*
And Motion Blur adds even more visual noise and muddies the final image even more.
So a modern game will often look pristine and super clean when you hold your camera completely still, but as soon as your character, and especially the camera, moves at all... MUD AND SMEARING.
And funnily enough we have an old game as an example here again, that at the time got a lot of flak for having the same issues, that nowadays are so common that noon even really talks about them in reviews or anything anymore...
And that game is Halo Reach.
Halo Reach was an early example of a game that used a form of Temporal Anti Aliasing... TAA.
And TAA at the time Halo Reach was made, was still firmly in its infancy, exhibiting a lot of issues and visual noise. So if you stood completely still in Halo Reach, it looked GLORIOUSLY smooth and clean... move the camera and it was a jittery mess.
These days TAA got a lot better, but it still has issues with ghosting and clear fizzle and disocclusion artifacts the moment something on screen moves.
But of course, TAA isn't the shiny new thing anymore... we now have FSR2, TSR and many other proprietary methods by different developers...
And these Upsampling methods basically bring bag almost all the issues Halo Reach had, and then some!
When you play Ocarina of Time at 20fps on an N64 connected to a CRT, motion is clean! You can see motion clearly, there's no artifacts from anything moving too fast, there is no blur to reduce legibility of the action happening around you, and there's no motion blur to try to make it seem smoother than it is.
"but why is this a 30fps problem mister Y" is what you are now asking I bet!
WELL, TAA, FSR2, TSR, CBR, ADD UPSAMPLING METHOD HERE... and Motion Blur, all of these rely on image data from previous frames!
THE LESS IMAGE DATA, THE MUDDIER THE IMAGE IS IN MOTION!
So, at 30fps these modern upsampling and anti aliasing methods have less temporal data available to them to create their final image!
A game running at 1440p FSR2 Quality Mode will look sharper and have less artifacts when running at 60fps than it would have at the same settings but locked to 30fps.
So the lower the framerate, the more "smear" the more "mud" and the more "fizzle" there is.
So in the end, all of this adds up.
The Motion Blur, the Image Reconstruction, the Antialiasing, all of it get worse the lower the framerate is.
This is why Jedi Survivor in motion looks like this (I purposefully took a shot from a spot where the game locks to 60fps to give it the best chances):
and F-Zero GX like this (I'm turning sharp left here to give it the worst chances with fast camera and vehicle movement):
Normalized for same image size so you don't have to zoom as much on mobile (not zoomed in in any way, just cropped)
And the lower the framerate, the worse all the weird grainy, blurry, fizzle, artifacts you see in Jedi Survivor will get. Meanwhile if you ran F-Zero GX at 10fps, it would look literally the exact same in terms of image quality and artifacts (because it has no artifacts)
And we haven't even touched motion blur, which is off in my screenshot here, along will all the other image filters.
If a game like Jedi Survivor runs at a lower framerate, the amount of data the engine has to draw the image from one frame to the next is reduced, the image gets less readable and muddy, and you will see blur in motion, even tho motion blur is off.
Smaller issues that aren't technical but due to Art Design of games:
Older games have different considerations when it comes to art (textures, models, scale) than modern games.
Older consoles couldn't have as much detail than newer consoles can handle. This means textures had less "visual noise", meaning there is less for your eyes to get hung up on, less to process for your brain.
In motion, when running through a level, or turning a camera, this means the things that are important, or could be important, as well as your general environment, is easier to digest.
You will have an easier time knowing where enemies are, or where a button or rope is, when it's simpler in design, bigger in scale and stands out more. And all of these features are features older graphics had!
On a wall with a simple flat texture, no shadows or reflections, seeing a red button that is on top of that unrealistically big in scale, is easier to see than a red button with realistic scale, on a wall with detailed textures, shadows of adjacent objects on it and other lighting applied.
So even if older games had the graphical issues I explained above, the simpler graphics would still make it way easier on your eyes, because there is not as much small detail that can get lost in all the blur, fizzle and breakup.
In short: Less Detail + Scale = Easier to read environments even at low framerates.
SO IN CONCLUSION:
Playing a game like Ocarina of Time will need getting used to at first, but once your eyes are adjusted to the 20fps output, the image will look pretty decent and clean.
Playing Jedi Survivor at 60fps already makes the whole image look muddy and blurry due to the artifacting of the upsamling. At 30fps this will only get worse, add Motion Blur to negate the stutter and you'll see barely anything in motion.
Playing Ocarina of Time at 20fps on real hardware will feel... not amazingly responsive, but more responsive than many modern games like... Jedi Survivor... or Redfall... or God of War Ragnarök feel at 30fps, hell some of them even at 60fps!
So you can not use an old game and point the finger at it saying "LOOK! back then we had no issues with this! this also ran at a super low framerate!", while not taking into account how modern game engines work, how they react to player input, and how they construct their final output image.
Old games had simple graphics, they were easier to parse by your eyes because important stuff was exaggerated in scale and shape, they didn't have motion blut, no reconstruction artifacts, no TAA or Screen Space effects that lag behind and take time to accumulate data. They had simpler engines with less latency.
And that is why they look cleaner and play better at low framerates than new games.
And yes, there are modern games and old games that are outliers from this. Like some modern ones like From Software games have pretty low latency, and some old games like Mortal Kombat on GameBoy have massive amounts of lag.
And some old games had weird fake motion blur which made the image hard to read, while some modern games have clean images with barely anything to muddy them in motion.
The difference is that there are more of the less good examples today, and more of the good examples in the past.
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