how are frame rates determined in games, can they be altered? Are they something that can be fixed in a patch if a game has a low framerate or framerate issues? How hard Is it to fix?
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Frame rate is limited by how long it takes the game to render the next frame. The bottleneck could be lack of resources (gpu/cpu/memory) or could just be a bug or lack of optimization. Varies drastically between games. Game settings can obviously impact frame rate, as generally, lower quality means faster. That said, it depends on the game and how it’s implemented.
Frame rate could also be artificially limited, or could be due to a hardware or driver issue on your end. Update your video drivers. Reboot. Try different settings. Wait for a patch. All those could help, or have no effect.
Games work by drawing a bunch of pictures. The number of pictures (i.e. frames) per second is called framerate.
Every time something in the game moves, the game needs to run a bunch of code to figure out how to draw the next picture. Weaker computers are slower at performing calculations, so it takes longer to run all the necessary code between each frame, making the framerate slower.
Sometimes the problem is in your hardware. You just don’t have a powerful enough computer. Other times, the code is badly written, so it takes an unnecessarily long amount of time between each frame. That can be fixed with a patch by optimizing the code.
Other answers explain what frame rates are and what can cause them to be good or bad, so I’ll just answer the others.
Frame rates can be fixed in a patch, the exception being if the game is optimized and your computer is too weak. There is a limit to this, though. How hard it is to fix and how much the fix improves the frame rate will depend on what the problem is and how well your code is written.
In programming, the quality of your code in each part as well as holistically is important. I can write incredibly good and fast logic for each part of my game, and still have code that is virtually impossible to easily change. Alternatively, you can have the worst and slowest logic imaginable for everything, but have your code structured well enough to allow for easy changes. As a result of this, you can’t really say if it’s easy or hard to change since it depends entirely on the code that we can’t see.
As an example consider putting together a puzzle. If you have to look through every single piece and then look through every available location to make the right choice, your code will be somewhat inefficient. But you could also have code that looks at an available location and tries to match that based only on pieces with a certain criteria, this looks at fewer locations and fewer pieces and will be faster. This is an example of good and bad code.
As an example of good or bad codebases as a whole, you can think of it in the same way. Imagine you have the puzzle put together, and you realize that a piece is in the wrong spot. If your “code” was built well, you could take out the wrong piece and put the right piece in without any issue. If your code were not built well, maybe you would also have to pull up some pieces over here because they’re glued to the piece you’re removing. Maybe taking out this piece causes another piece to break, so you need to order a new piece online.
You can put a puzzle together with the good logic, but have to use the bad method to take it apart or vice-versa.
There are cases where there were easy optimizations that were massive improvements. One case is the original FFXIV before 2.0 released. This game had insanely large textures and numbers of polygons, a pot of flowers had more polygons than the player character. The more things you have to render, the longer it takes, so an “easy” fix here that was made in 2.0 was dialing this back.
There are also cases where companies have “good” code but go through and make a billion tiny optimizations which end up being a huge improvement overall, but they generally don’t tell you what they change, so it’s hard to give examples.
The frame rate is basically how fast your computer can render the images. There are millions of calculations involved in rendering a single image. The frame rate you get will be determined based on three factors: software, hardware, and environment/temporal factors.
Hardware is just how fast your hardware is (CPU, GPU, memory, disk etc) and what resources are available (eg. amount of RAM, number of cores). The only way to improve this is to upgrade your hardware.
Software is how well optimised the game’s code is. Realistically only the game developer can improve this, by optimisaing the code (eliminating waste, structuring code to be more efficient, implementing shortcuts for specific situations, working with vendors to take better advantage of certain hardware features etc).
Environmental/temporal factors are things like, what other programs are you running at the same time, how much free disk or RAM do you have, how complex is this particular scene of the game, what graphics settings (eg. resolution) have you configured etc. Changing these things you can often do yourself, for free, and should always be the first thing to look at if you want to improve frame rate, though not always without some sacrifice (being unable to stream online, getting worse quality graphics etc).
There isn’t one single cause for a low frame rate, and it cannot easily be predicted or improved. Frame rate can be “altered” by changing one or more of these factors, but it’s not like you can just tell a game to run at a higher frame rate and it will magically do so. The frame rate you get is determined by the limitations and bottlenecks of those 3 factors combined. Very rarely, some games are “locked” to a specific frame rate, like 30 or 60 FPS, regardless of what your system is capable of rendering. But even then it’s not necessarily easy to “unlock” this and there may be unintended consequences in doing so (eg. physics bugs).
Frame rates are just a measurement for how fast your device can display the image.
This varies widely depending on your device and the graphics settings and engine your game uses
There are many ways to increase your frame rate
* you upgrade your device, depending on what is causing the issues. Does the game require more CPU power? or does it need a higher polygon count?
* you lower the resolution and/or quality. Ray tracing requires a high end graphics card so this can be turned off, maybe lower the texture quality, resolution etc. Shadows and lighting are a big one usually. There is generally not much visual difference between say ultra and high but your device has to process less
* update your drivers for your graphics card as that can lead to improvements especially for new releases. I am not sure exactly what happens on the driver level
* The game developers may release an update that has more efficient code or more likely, reduced polygon counts or reducing unused processes. e.g reduce the quality of characters at a distance that is not noticeable when playing but the device will still have to process. Remove or minimise processes of screen. Does character x need to be doing anything while off screen? does your device need to process grass that you can’t see?
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