I’m new to game dev and I’m only just starting to create my scenes. I try my best to make it as optimized as possible keep the fps high, but I noticed with my scene being full of meshes and foliages, even with culling and LODs, fps fluctuate from 60 to 120. Is this considered normal/acceptable for a game?
30 is still the minimum. 60 is recommended. 60+ is high or ultra. so… it should be fine.
also consider a framecap if you don’t need all of that (cinematic games can be played on 60 or even less) and to not burn the user’s cpus and gpus to a crisp. also helps steady pacing of the graphics and helps avoid micro stutter issues.
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I agree, 30 is good, 60 is better, but you also want to make sure you can maintain a fairly consistent 60. That it doesn’t dip to something like 40 a lot. If you get this problem, it might be better to lock to 30.
Here’s an article that might be useful.
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nice article. what it doesn’t mention is what happens if you use non 60 hz panel aka tv.
on pc and pc screen panels you have alot more headroom of variable fps. the base line is you divide the hz your panel delivers by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… whatever whole number, and if you get a whole number back without fraction you get a frame rate you can target. the core priniciple of the framerate cap. you gotta deliver the frames in this certain amount of frametime tho, to not stutter and vsync nicely.
choose a target fps, wisely.
just for reference. a 144 Hz panel delivers tight sync fps of 144 native obvi, but it also does:
72 on every 2nd sync
48 on every 3rd sync ( hr cinema )
36 on every 4th sync
24 on every 5th sync ( oldschool cinema : )
note: bummer it’s not tv standard yet. one could produce smooth tv with less compute cost at 48 fps. but… who am i? the industry blows it up instead of making it efficient. hmm…
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Would you say it’s better to keep my game’s FPS consistently locked at 60, even if it means not chasing higher FPS like 120 but avoiding drastic fluctuations between 60 and 120? I’m curious if the stability outweighs the higher frame rate for smoothness.
Amazing article! Thanks!
notice this on UnrealEngine:
if you play your game on the editor (Play button above the viewport will enter Play In Editor mode aka: PIE), and you get for example 60 fps (you can see fps with console command “stat fps”), you will probably get 2x the fps on a compiled release build of the game.
When game is tested using PIE mode, there is overhead from debug stuff and also the shaders and other game resources are not optimized so that will also reduce the fps.
On my games if i get 60fps on editor, i usually get around 120fps when i play the release version of my game, so personally i try to keep my fps on PIE mode above 60 so then when my game is compiled to release version, i can be sure the final fps is good.
and i think 60 fps on a release build is a bare minimum since most common displays and TVs use 60hertz refresh rate.
also note that if you do lock your fps using vsync or similar, it might cause input lag.
so test vsync and allow user to disable it. if your mouse cursor starts to get laggy or it “has an input delay” when vsync is enabled, you will know what causes it.
vsync limits the fps to the display/monitor refreshrate.