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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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).
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