If a computer is powerful enough, how does it know not to play videos or perform logic for games at a faster speed?

Question

I don’t know if I’m explaining this right…
A computer can run logic at some speed based on how powerful the components of it are, so if it can perform the logic of something, for example, movement in a game, how does it know how much should be done based on its power, instead of essentially running in “fast-forward” or conversely in slow motion?

In: 1307

Answer 1

Fun fact: on its own, it doesn’t! We have to specifically tell it to slow down.

Computers contain a clock that they can use to measure real-world time. When you write a game or a video program or such, you can tell the computer to use that clock to do things at the correct speed – usually by making it take a break every once in a while.

Imagine you’ve been told you have to draw a picture every hour. If you’re slow at drawing things, it might take you that whole hour. If you’re fast at drawing things, though, you could make a drawing in 15 minutes, and then spend 45 minutes waiting around doing whatever you want until you have to start the next drawing – like getting homework done early! Computers are like that – they do what they need to do in the time they were told to do it (for games and movies, this is often 1/60th of a second), and if they get done ‘too fast’ then they just wait until the time’s up. If we’re really clever, we can have them spend that time working on other things, or we can ask them to draw even *nicer* pictures since we have all this extra time.

Once in a while you can find an old game or program that wasn’t told to do that properly, and playing it on new, modern hardware can cause some issues because the computer does things (some things, or even *all* things) much too fast.