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

Typically, a computer game doesn’t run the computer “at top speed”, there’s a clock involved.

There are a few ways to do this. One is that each frame, you look at how much time has passed since the last frame, and make the game “move forward” that much time. So if it’s been 0.03 seconds, and your bullet/ character is moving at some speed, you can calculate how far it should have gone, etc.

Now, really old games (DOS era) often didn’t do this, and they consequently *were* much faster on faster hardware. I remember it being a real problem and having to run games in an emulated environment to slow them down.