eli5: Older 3d videogames get crazy when subjected to modern framerate. Why is that, and why did binding game’s engine to FPS became a trend in the first place?
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Unless a game’s speed is run on a clock (each action takes X milliseconds), it will run at the speed of the tightest bottleneck. You remove this bottleneck by playing it on a more powerful computer, you increase the speed.
It’s not just 3D games. I had an old 2D game that ran fine on a 486/33, but push the “turbo” button to clock double to 66 MHz and everything zipped around so fast that it was unplayable. It was CPU bottlenecked, so increasing the CPU speed allowed it to run faster.
The first difficulty increase in a game was due to this effect. The CPU in the video game Space Invaders had a hard time drawing all the aliens on the screen in addition to all the other game mechanics it had to handle. So they moved slowly in the beginning. But each shot alien relieved some load on the CPU, so the aliens are moving much faster by the time you only have a few of them left. Modern remakes of the game have to purposely set an increased alien speed over time to mimic this effect.
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