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Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

Locking a game to 30hz would not have been a "decent design choice" given that's half the refresh rate of nearly every computer monitor out there, especially for a game that involves a lot of scrolling.

Games get mocked for locking to 60hz, 30hz would get them laughed at outright.

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The devs supposedly aimed for 30 FPS (but missed it, because that would be for low end hardware?)

In my experience 30 FPS is perfectly fine for a game like this, I'm not sure what do you mean about "scrolling" ?

It's the much more fast paced, mostly first person games that really need those 60+ FPS...

I notice when my mouse updates at 30fps. The movement feels noticably choppier.

That is a fair call. The game visual updating slow is not a huge issue but if the input cursor is slow, it is very apparent.

Considering something like Simcity 2000/3000. Visual update is probably in single digits FPS most of the time, but the input cursor is very smooth.

Yes, but this is an unrelated issue. Last game I have seen to not have an "hardware cursor" option/default was a badly made DirectX 8 one that has trouble running on Windows 7.

>In my experience 30 FPS is perfectly fine for a game like this, I'm not sure what do you mean about "scrolling" ?

A top down city sim 'scrolls' up/down/left/right around a map, which is a movement that is strongly associated to screen tearing -- which i'm not really sure is a relevant thing to bring up given the variety of v-sync options available.

Even a game locked at 30fps that 'scrolls' often shouldn't experience significant tearing with the options out there.

Even without tearing, a high framerate is very desirable for scrolling around a map or web page. For instance, iphones are widely praised for excelling in this regard. It's just easier on the eyes if things on screen move smoothly when you scroll/pan around, it's less fatiguing.

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