Starfield's performance is locked on Xbox, Todd Howard says, causing worry about the space sim on PC, but a God of War Ragnarok dev comes to Bethesda’s defense.
Not doing it also causes issues in the form of micro stutters when some but not other frames have updated physics or not.
Frame pacing is hard, and locking everything down happens to be the only sure-fire way to completely eliminate display issues. But then, of course, you have a locked frame rate.
I’m not in the industry, but I’ve dabbled in Unity and that’s just kind of how it works by default. You create a game object and it gets an Update() function that is called once per frame. You’re encouraged to perform calculations and update it’s position in that callback.
You’re supposed to use Time.deltaTime to scale your calculations based on how long it’s been since the last frame.
But that takes effort and it’s very easy to just not do that and your game will still work fine in most cases.
Remember Red Dead Redemption 2? On PC, your stats depleted faster the more FPS you had so with 60FPS you’d get hungry twice as fast as with 30FPS.
Iirc even the sun moved faster so a day was only half as long.
What irks me is when game developers ties the physics engine to the framerate. We all know this will cause issues down the road, could we just… not?
Not doing it also causes issues in the form of micro stutters when some but not other frames have updated physics or not. Frame pacing is hard, and locking everything down happens to be the only sure-fire way to completely eliminate display issues. But then, of course, you have a locked frame rate.
They better delivery that “visual fidelity” if you are already capping at 30 fps on a current-gen console.
I imagine there is some reason we still see this. Any devs in the Industry lurking?
I’m not in the industry, but I’ve dabbled in Unity and that’s just kind of how it works by default. You create a game object and it gets an Update() function that is called once per frame. You’re encouraged to perform calculations and update it’s position in that callback.
You’re supposed to use
Time.deltaTimeto scale your calculations based on how long it’s been since the last frame.But that takes effort and it’s very easy to just not do that and your game will still work fine in most cases.
Unity also has FixedUpdate which is encouraged to be used for any physics related updates.
Is this really a thing lately? Maybe on some Switch games, but I think most modern games can have a dynamic framerate.
Skyrim famously did this. So the concern that Starfield could have similar issues is not unfounded.
One one hand, Skyrim was released in 2011, on the other hand Skyrim was also released in 2022
Remember Red Dead Redemption 2? On PC, your stats depleted faster the more FPS you had so with 60FPS you’d get hungry twice as fast as with 30FPS. Iirc even the sun moved faster so a day was only half as long.
In Dark Souls 2 the weapon durability was cut in half at 60 fps compared to 30 fps as well. They did eventually patch it though.
How does that work in multiplayer
I think they fixed this with Fallout 76, so here’s hoping that those changes also made its way into their future projects.