Why Frametime is More Important than Frame per Seconds in Terms of Gaming Smoothness. And more.
Do you ever feel playing the 30fps games in Console over PC aren’t the same smooth experience? First, there is different input lag between those two different platforms when you are using a controller in console, while using mouse and a keyboard over pc. And Console has Heavily optimized games for their hardware capabilities when pc over varieties of hardware and configuration. And the secret behind the console smoothness is Consistent Frametime.
Let’s say if you run a games at 60fps, you have 60 frame rendered at every second to your screens, but is every frame within an interval of second has rendered perfectly in time? If it not rendered perfectly in time what will happened? What happened within that seconds called Frametime.
How do we know what frametime we need to achieve as it considered a stable frametime?
For example, 60fps is 1/60 seconds, then we convert it to ms(milisecond) which is 16,6667ms. So we need to achieve atleast 16,66 frametime to get the smooth motion.
What about 30fps? Its same concept that 1/30 seconds to ms is 33,33. and so on.
My frame per seconds is high but i got choppy images and movement! That is the case when frametime isn’t stable and we called it a Stuttering. When lagging is a kinda different case if your hardware is potato and you got slow motion.
Stuttering can happen from your slow storage, slow cpu or gpu that can’t handle intensive and consistent data flow when it needs to be rendered in time.
In order to eliminate the stuttering, we need to know the capabilities of our hardware, if you can achieve more than 60fps like 75, 120 or more, but had a noticeable Framedrop you need to limit your fps to your match screen Refresh Rate. Let’s say you have 60hz display then cap it to 60fps using a v-sync or v-sync with half of refresh rate if you aim at 30.
I didn’t got any framedrop while my fps is high too but the images are like ripped or had horizontal line over a movement!
That’s the case when your gpu render more frame and isn’t synchronized with your screen refresh rate, it called a Screen Tearing.
If you’re not distracted by it and your purpose is to get as much fps you can squeeze out from your gpu, its totally fine. Just considered to buy high refresh rate monitor or using a G-Sync or Freesync.
You can’t do all this tweaks in a Console but in a PC or Mobile Gaming (if there’s a graphic settings with this option) you can apply this concept. MSI Afterburner with RivaTuner Statistics are a tools you can use to Cap your Framerate and in combination with In-Game graphic options, v-sync, etc to get a console like smoothness.
Some tips from me is use Motion Blur especially in 30fps to make it more natural because console do a lot, IMO.
So FPS is not the only performance metric in smoothness of gaming, but consistent frametime and align it to match with your screen refresh rate does.
