Hacker News Reader

Comment by opan | Hacker News Reader

There's a weird cult-like attitude around 40fps that I've noticed. Personally I run everything at the normal 60hz and almost everything I play runs fine, even at the higher resolution (1920x1200) of my external monitor. Counter-Strike 2 runs horribly and Baldur's Gate 3 was sub-60, but mostly I don't play anything that demanding (mostly indie, lots of 2D). It might matter more if you play all the new AAA titles that come out.

View on HN

> There's a weird cult-like attitude around 40fps that I've noticed.

As someone who learnt about this public 40fps love just a few minutes, I'd like to add that this was something I had noticed myself years ago. 40fps feels "smooth" and closer to 60fps, than 25/30fps for some reason. Unfortunately my graphics card struggled but that's a different story.

I think I'm missing something with graphics cards. I have a 1060 on a i7-3770 and it can put out 120fps on most games. My M1 Macbook can play those same games through Rosetta 2 and Wine + GPTK at a similar FPS.

What are people doing that they have like a 3080 on a 12700 and can barely hit 60fps??

Anecdotally, I play recent 3d games on an ultrawide (not quite 4k but significantly higher res than 1080p). It's 3440x1440 pixels with a 144 Hz refresh. On a 4080 and ultra settings, most games can't get there. Thankfully DLSS makes it a lot better.

(Using geforce now on a MacBook hooked up to an external monitor).

BG3 is very smooth. Cities Skylines 2 stutters. Starfield was okay. Talos Principle 2 is laggy. Cyberpunk is laggy.

Normally I don't care about graphics all that much, so I'll usually turn the details down to medium or even low. But these days DLSS is so good that's less necessary.

Well, you havent mentioned your screen resolution. The people struggling with the 4080s are going to max settings and 4k, possibly with some RTX effects because they paid for the whole GPU.

In my specific case with the graphics card, back then in 2016/17 I was using an intel UHD5500. Now in 2023 I’m using… an Intel HD520.

Yes I need a new laptop *frustration*

It's not a cult, 40 is just a sweet spot between performance, battery life, and comfort for a large number of demanding 3D games. If you often play in docked mode, the battery life doesn't mattery so you can probably achieve 50 or 60 in some modern games.

There's a lot of stuff that can't reach 60fps but has headroom over 30fps, that's where the 40 comes from. It's a completely arbitrary point, just happens to be halfway between 1/60 and 1/30 s, and (external benefit for stuff like PS5 Spider-Man 2) it divides evenly into 120Hz displays without needing variable refresh.

I used 40fps on my steam deck for playing Death Stranding. It's not a fast paced game, so the smoothness reduction wasn't huge. But it is demanding and visuals are a big part of the experience, so being able to turn up the graphics a bit was great.

I guess I play faster games than most because I always put the graphics settings to lowest detail, native resolution, and aim for 144fps (my monitor's native refresh rate). Anything less than 90fps/Hz is pretty bad to me.

That's pretty reasonable. My phone screen is 120hz but my main computer monitors are only 60hz, so I more-or-less don't know what I'm missing. I tend to care more about color and viewing angles than refresh rate on a monitor and steer more toward the professional side than the gaming side, so I haven't had much exposure to very high refresh rates on a regular basis yet. My monitors are also pretty old now, but they still work fine. A couple HP ZR24w monitors I got refurbished from Newegg. I think of them as being like the monitor equivalent to a used-ThinkPad/EliteBook.

That's at least partially because of the mismatch between display refresh rate and frame rate - one of the things that makes the Deck's 40 fps mode on the internal display nice is that it also changes the display refresh rate to 40hz, making it look consistent and synchronised.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com