No Stupid Questions

Stability of those fps are even more important. Modern games have problems with that.

It's a few things, but a big one is the framerate jumping around (inconsistent frame time). A consistent 30fps feels better than 30, 50, 30, 60, 45, etc. Many games will have a frame cap feature, which is helpful here. Cap the game off at whatever you can consistently hit in the game that your monitor can display. If you have a 60hz monitor, start with the cap at 60.

Also, many games add motion blur, AI generated frames, TAA, and other things that really just fuck up everything. You can normally turn those off, but you have to know to go do it.

If you are on console, good fucking luck. Developers rarely include such options on console releases.

Stuttering, but mostly it's the FPS changing.

Lock the FPS to below the lowest point where it lags, and suddenly it wont feel as bad since it's consistent.

EDIT: I completley skipped over that you used Fallout 4 as an example. That engine tied game speed and physics to fps last time I played. So unless you mod the game, things will literally move "slower" as the fps drops.

Probably consistency.

Zelda was 20 fps, but it was 20 fps all the time so your brain adjusted to it. You could get lost in the world and story and forget you were playing a game.

Modern games fluctuate so much that it pulls you right out.

Game design is a big part of this too. Particularly first person or other fine camera control feels very bad when mouse movement is lagging.

I agree with what the other commenters are saying too, if it feels awful at 45 fps your 0.1% low frame rate is probably like 10 fps

I think it has something to do with frame times.

I'm not an expert but I feel like I remember hearing that low framerate high frametime feels worse than low framerate low frametime. Something to do with the delay it takes to actually display the low framerate?

As some of the other comments mentioned, it's probably also the framerate dropping in general too.

Well a good chunk of it is that older games only had ONE way they were played. ONE framerate, ONE resolution. They optimized for that.

Nowadays they plan for 60, 120, and if you have less too bad. Upgrade for better results.

Couple things. Frame timing is critical and modern games aren’t programmed as close to the hardware as older games were.

Second is the shift from CRT to modern displays. LCDs have inherent latency that is exacerbated by lower frame rates (again, related to frame timing).

Lastly with the newest displays like OLED, because of the way the screen updates, lower frame rates can look really jerky. It’s why TVs have all that post processing and why there’s no “dumb” TVs anymore. Removing the post process improves input delay, but also removes everything that makes the image smoother, so higher frame rates are your only option there.

old games animations were sometimes made frame by frame. like the guy who drew the character pixel by pixel was like "and in the next frame of this attack the sword will be here"

My favorite game of all time is Descent, PC version to be specific, I didn't have a PlayStation when I first played it.

The first time I tried it, I had a 386sx 20MHz, and Descent, with the graphics configured at absolute lowest size and quality, would run at a whopping 3 frames per second!

I knew it was basically unplayable on my home PC, but did that stop me? Fuck no, I took the 3 floppy disks installer to school and installed it on their 486dx 66MHz computers!

I knew it would just be a matter of time before I got a chance to upgrade my own computer at home.

I still enjoy playing the game even to this day, and have even successfully cross compiled the source code to run natively on Linux.

But yeah I feel you on a variety of levels regarding the framerate thing. Descent at 3 frames per second is absolutely unplayable, but 20 frames per second is acceptable. But in the world of Descent, especially with modern upgraded ports, the more frames the better 👍

It depends on what you're running, but often if the frame rate is rock solid and consistent it helps it feel a lot less stuttery. Fallout games are not known for their stability and well functioning unfortunately.

For comparison, deltarune came out a few days ago, that's locked to 30 fps. Sure it's not a full 3D game or anything, but there's a lot of complex motion in the battles and it's not an issue at all. Compared to something like bloodborne or the recent Zeldas, even after getting used to the frame rate they feel awful because they're stuttering all the damn time.

Part of it is about how close you are to the target FPS. They likely made the old N64 games to run somewhere around 24 FPS since that was an extremely common "frame rate" for CRT TVs common at the time. Therefore, the animations of, well, basically everything that moves in the game can be tuned to that frame rate. It would probably look like jank crap if they made the animations have 120 frames for 1 second of animation, but they didn't.

On to Fallout 4... Oh boy. Bethesda jank. Creation engine game speed is tied to frame rate. They had several problems with the launch of Fallout76 because if you had a really powerful computer and unlocked your frame rate, you would be moving 2-3 times faster than you should have been. It's a funny little thing to do in a single-player game, but absolutely devastating in a multi-player game. So, if your machine is chugging a bit and the frame rate slows down, it isn't just your visual rate of new images appearing that is slowing down, it's the speed at which the entire game does stuff that slowed down. It feels bad.

And also, as others have said, frame time, dropped frames, and how stable the frame rate is makes a huge difference too in how it "feels".

The display being at a higher resolution doesnt help either. Running retro games on my fancy flatscreen hi-def massive TV makes them look and feel so much worse than on the smaller fuzzy CRT screens of the time.

I can't stand modern games with lower frame rates. I had to give up on Avowed and a few other late titles on the series S because it makes me feel sick when turning the camera. I assume most of the later titles on xbox will be doing this as theyre starting to push what the systems are capable of and the series S can't really cope as well.

Two things that haven't quite been mentioned yet:

1) Real life has effectively infinite FPS, so you might expect that the closer a game is to reality, the higher your brain wants the FPS to be in order for it to make sense. This might not be true for everyone, but I imagine it could be for some people.

More likely: 2) If you've played other things at high FPS you might be used to it on a computer screen, so when something is below that performance, it just doesn't look right.

These might not be entirely accurate on their own and factors of these and other things mentioned elsewhere might be at play.

Source: Kind of an inversion of the above: I can't focus properly if games are set higher than 30FPS; It feels like my eyes are being torn in different directions. But then, the games I play are old or deliberately blocky, so they're not particularly "real" looking, and I don't have much trouble with real life's "infinite" FPS.

Some old games are still pretty rough with their original frame rate. I recently played 4 player golden eye on an n64, and that frame rate was pretty tough to deal with. I had to retrain my brain to process that.

FPS counters in games usually display an average across multiple frames. That makes the number actually legible if the FPS fluctuates, but if it fluctuates really hard on a frame-by-frame, it might seem inaccurate. If I have a few frames here that were outputted at 20 FPS, and a few there that were at 70 FPS, the average of those would be 45 FPS. However, you could still very much tell that the framerate was either very low or very high, which would be perceived as stutter. Your aforementioned old games probably were frame-capped to 20, while still having lots of processing headroom to spare for more intensive scenes.

Bro when Majora's mask came out nothing was 60fps lol. We weren't used to it like how we are today. I'm used to 80fps so 60 to me feels like trash sometimes.

I think player expectations play a big role here. It's because you grew up with 20fps on ocarina of time that you accept how it looks.

I'm pretty sure that game is not a locked 20 FPS and can jump around a bit between 15-20, so the argument that it is locked 20 and so feels smooth doesn't really convince me.

If that game came out today as an indie game it would be getting trashed for its performance.

If you’re not playing on a VRR display 45fps *will * be horrible and stuttery. 30fps locked would feel significantly better.