» Sat Jul 14, 2012 3:21 am 40 fps is beyond perfect and 20 fps is more than playable!
tweak tweak
tweak tweak
Being playable is not exactly what I want from a game, if I wanted playable I would stick to my ps3. What I am aiming for is smooth. And 60fps is smooth. This might sound a little uppity of me, and yeah, it might be - but it's because I had to live with console games for many years of my life - and once I moved onto pc, and played that for several years, I realized that most of my eye strain, and headaches, was from low fps games (and wearing hats, yeah, hats) . Additionally, I find games at 40-50-60 fps to be comfortable and enjoyable on the eyes, the opposite feeling of the strain that 20-30fps brings. Like in oblivion stutter remover, i recently installed a new copy and it overwrote the ini, suddenly, it was 30fps locked. AHHH. MY EYES!!! Mind you, it was nice to see a non variable framerate of 30 (instead of whimsical shifts from 35-50 with all the obge stuff going on). But overall, it felt like I was moving around in slow motion. Everything had kind of a... picture-picture-picture feeling to it. Some games manage to hide the low fps better than others, like I can handle crysis 1 and 2 at the occational dips into 30. I think proper motion blurring helps (both object and camera).
Recently I was playing the brilliant red dead redemption on my ps3, and as much as I was loving the content, I was always fighting it with my eyes. That game runs in the teens a whole lot, I had to identify this to figure out why I was not getting into the game. Something was forceably pushing me away from it. That's why I tend to spend a lot of time optimizing my oblivion install, making sure every mesh is optimized, runnning the performance liquid water shader, setting the ugrids to 8 in the ini, using streamline with min framerate being 40, so that better cities does not throw me into teen territory. For me, framerate is directly linked to immersion. And that's kind of why part of me is glad skyrim will run nicely (console being the lead = 50-60fps). Sure i'll install all the graphic mods for skyrim the moment they come out, but I'll drop those sliders if I have to to make those graphics mods more playable. Must have the best of both worlds!
/end epic rant.
That's also why I feel a bit brokenhearted that the newer liquid water and obge3 take my fps down to 45fps instead of liquid water with all the shaders running from it's esp, running at 60fps with ssao fog fixed in that. Now I have to disable either godrays or ssao to get that 60fps back. And ssao is a must have. I shall miss you godrays. I shall miss you dearly.
I get what you're saying, though I suppose it's not to that extreme for me really. Like, 30+ fps has always felt like a luxury, and since I don't suffer eye strain or headaches at lower framerates (that tends to come more from staring at a monitor for long periods in general) and the responsiveness of the game is still intact quite well enough for me, I find framerates in the teens to even be acceptable at times. It's by no means preferable, but I'll definitely choose graphical fidelity over performance to more extreme degrees, I guess you could say. It helps that I haven't really played console games regularly for years, and the only PC games I've played in the last couple years are Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 (both of which ran perfectly smooth at highest settings on this computer of course). So I'm not immersed in gaming enough to have really spent as much time concerned with performance as I would have five, ten years ago. But those things can change too.
