Way back in the day, every game had its logic tied to its framerate – As anyone who’s ever tried to run an eighties PC game on a nineties PC only to see it run at 20x speed and completely unplayable can tell you.

But in the modern day this is less common. Generally the game keeps chugging along at the same pace, no matter how fast or slow the frames are being presented (unless, of course, everything is bogged down so hard that even the game logic is struggling)

And yet, you’ll still find a few. Any fan of Dark Souls who played on PC back when Prepare to Die edition first came to PC will remember how unlocking the framerate could cause collision bugs and send you into the void. And I recently watched a video of a gent who massively overclocked a Nintendo Switch OLED and got Tears of the Kingdom to run at 60FPS… Except everything was, indeed, running in fast-forward, rather than just being smoother.

This makes me wonder – Is there some unseen advantage to keeping game logic and framerate tied together? Perhaps something that only really shows on weaker hardware? Or is it just devs going “well the hardware we’re targeting won’t really go over this speed, and we don’t really give a fuck about anything else” and not bothering to implement it?

  • Ephera
    14·
    2 months ago

    To make this maybe a bit more concrete, without decoupling them, your game logic will look basically like this:

    1. Update all the values (e.g. if something has a velocity, then move it forward).
    2. Read the values to render graphics into the framebuffer, from where your screen can grab it.
    3. Repeat from step 1.

    For these things to be decoupled, you suddenly need them to run at the same time, which means you suddenly have to deal with multiple threads and inconsistencies in the state and whatnot.
    If you’re using a proper game engine, these things are typically largely solved for you, but especially in the 80s, you wouldn’t have game engines that you could just use.