Frame rate almost always drops but many times the game will crash as well. Why does this occur?
In: Technology
Computers keep track of objects and their properties through some lines of code. For example, if the object moves, the game has to keep track of its position, speed, etc.
Now, for every object that’s currently loaded (in some cases it doesn’t need to be on screen, just in the game world at the time), the computer has to keep track of all of them. As the number of objects increases, more processing power is necessary, which causes the frame drops you were talking about.
If we keep adding more and more objects, there comes a point when the computer can no longer keep track of everything, or it needs more processing power than it actually has. It has two options at this point: Either it keeps trying to load everything, creating heat as the processor gets overloaded; or the game notices that it can’t keep up and crashes to prevent damage to the computer.
Wow first time I’ve been able to answer one of these. You won’t be able to generalize this to every game, but for the most part this causes the program to run out of memory. Every object on the screen needs to be tracked in memory, programs (and computers in general) have a limited amount of memory and when that limit is reached and the program tries to use more execution will fail causing the game to crash.
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