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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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.
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