sigh why am I explaining this again? is it really hard to understand? why?
Having a consistent 40fps is much worse (for a gamer) than a variable framerate that will dip down to 40fps for 1% (or 10%) of the play time. Having to limit your most complex scene to what can be guaranteed rendered at 60fps is much less appealing to a developer than making sure all the likely scenes can render at 60fps.
stuttering animations is better than smooth animations?
Stuttering is better than smooth. gotcha.
> Your question was answered;
for someone who doesn't appear to understand what I'm asking you have a high degree of confidence that I've been answered.
What is so terrible about having a lower complexity budget that guarantees 60fps? What if you had 60 fps no exceptions as a constraint in your hardware and software design, how far could you really go with some creativity? Think about it- is having a complexity ceiling the only possible way to ensure 60fps?
>Think about it- is having a complexity ceiling the only possible way to ensure 60fps?
I'm really not following you. Are you asking what is the benefit of this technology when games come out every day at 60fps even now? This technology allows them to get the same fidelity and smoothness on less powerful hardware, with more complicated simulations, and lower latency.
Are you asking why renders can't maintain perfectly steady frame rates without going above or below 60fps, regardless of WHAT they are rendering on screen or what is happening in the simulation? You can't see how that's a 'non trivial' problem?
The most notable example of a game using dynamic tradeoffs to maintain a solid 60FPS is ID's Rage engine -- written by Johh Carmack, one the people on stage at this very presentation, who was lauding this technology and saying he has been pushing GPU and monitor manufacturers to implement this for years.
Carmack notes that while they were able to stay at 60 with an incredible amount of work, if they had been able to target 90% of 60fps with this technology there would have been little visual difference but the gameplay and visual complexity ceiling would have been vastly higher.
I'm asking someone to explain this. because I don't get it.
Isn't meeting the frame deadline kind of more important than scene complexity?
Pro Tip: If an entire industry of experienced people finds something very hard, and you don't know anything about the topic but you don't see why it would be hard, maybe the relevant factor here is the "you don't know."
It reminds me of my mom who said on multiple occasions "All these rockets are dangerous and they explode; I don't see why the scientists don't just use the majestic forces that keep the planets in their orbits to move the rocket."
do you understand? "because it's hard" is not an interesting answer. It's a boring and contentless answer.
As for the start of an answer, what was wrong with just .. starting with that? What was the point of all the other stuff you wrote? Think about it. what is your mission here? to be informative or just to attempt to make me feel bad for being curious?
Seriously I will not tolerate this curiosity shaming, the ethic that one should feel embarrassed about asking questions. I do not buy the idea that it is condescending to be dissatisfied with shallow lazy nothing answers. I have no control over you perceiving it that way. It is just a flaw in your background that you should perhaps be more self aware about.
No, they are being rude. There was no reason to post that verbal diarrhoea and I'm just not taking it like a doormat, and that bothers you. The common factor is them being dickheads. If you look, there are lots of other thoughtful people answering me (with real actual answers and creativity instead of condescension) that I am rewarding and conversing with appropriately.
The common factor is the culture of curiosity shaming here. And sorry, but quite frankly you and them can just get fucked. I don't care if you think I am being rude. I want to be rude about that. It is internet cancer. Other thoughtful people should be rude about it too. I want to shoo that attitude away from everywhere I can. Not walk on eggs just in case someone might take offense. You have no interest in making me "self aware". You just see a nail sticking up and you want to hammer it down.
I don't know what to say about you telling me what my motivations are. Stop snapping to self-righteous conclusions.
Basically, a GPU is a very complex computer with several hierarchies of execution streams e.g. there are vector SIMD streams that execute same code over different data, there are threads of such streams that preempt each other, there multiple processing units each running a set of such threads, and there are even structures of such processing units. Yet all of this is hidden from the programmer and only API there is an abstract "scene" description. E.g. you can say "first render these polygons with such and such settings, then render other polygons with other settings, then show what is rendered so far and return to the default state".
Going from such a high level description to the thousands of execution streams that GPU will execute is a very complex procedure that changes with each driver version and is not fully understood by any single person. On top of this you have other processes running on your machine while playing the game and they can and will steal CPU and the OS scheduling slots, adding a lot of variance to your frame time.
You can render the same data set several times and sometime it will take 10ms but other times it will take 100ms depending on what other processes decided to do at the time so it's impossible to guarantee constant frame time on PC.
On consoles it's not a big deal as you can program the GPU directly and don't compete with other processes. A great number of games do run with constant frame rate - it's not trivial but it's not a rocket science either.
There seem to be two ways to interpret your question:
>1.) Why can't games render 60 frames per second always?
Because some scenes are more complex than others. Rendering a complex scene can longer than 16.7 ms, and there is no way around that.
>2.) If a game comes far below the frame completion deadline (e.g., completes a frame in 0.5 ms, where the deadline is 16.7 ms), why doesn't it simply stop doing anything until the deadline has passed?
I do not know the answer. But I can say that many games actually do this. It is usually referred to as a frame cap.
Furthermore, 60 fps is not "just under the limit" for what a human can see; read e.g.:
Nowadays when I program games, I cannot get a promise that a frame event will fire. I can get a "well, this code may run, unless the operating system needs those cycles".
So, so is skipping a whole frame, OR halving the frame rate really the best that is possible? Why is it either/or? What are operating systems, hardware vendors and driver writers doing about it?
But that is not what tearing is. Tearing is, you've missed the deadline, so you finish the rendering to completion, then swap the buffer in the middle of a vertical scan. What you're saying is, you can do that, or wait until the next vertical scan before swapping the buffer. And further more, that can either result in simply a skipped frame, or the game switches down to a 30fps mode, perhaps based on some running statistical about frame render durations.
I'm reminded about a discussion Carmack (was it him? or am I having a brain fart) about mitigating the tearing and framerate problem by doing per scanline rendering instead of per frame rendering.
hmmm! I will have a long think