how come in certain games increasing the frame rate messes things up but in other games having an unlocked frame rate does nothing?

Question

For instance, half life 2 can be played at 300fps and the whole game runs completely fine.

However other games might have a 30 or 60fps cap and anything higher than that messes things up like physics, animations ECT.

What’s the benefit of a game having things tied to the frame rate as opposed to unlocked and why do some games handle this better than others?

In: 4

Answer 1

Because some games, physics are tied to clock cycles and so are draw-times, and in others, both are decoupled from clock cycles. Why? Because in older machines, everything was run through the CPU and this is the way programmers were taught to do things (x# of clock cycles to process the physics, x# of clock cycles to draw the screen) and it became The Way Things Are Done. Maybe some modern programmers weren’t taught that way, but there are also a high number of function calls that just keep getting recycled through the years, and if these lock to clock cycles, well…the whole thing locks to clock cycles.

Quals: programmed in Pascal. Drawing to the screen on an IBM PS/2 was *such* a PITA