Sarge is upset.....

[Sgt Slaughter]

Ok...

I made the mistake of reading the forums last night when I logged out of a game. One thread was about what everyone's fps was. I started reading the replies and thinking..."hey, my game seems to run real smooth, I'll bet my fps is up there with the higher avgs. So dumb me goes back in, types out the command in the console..and gets bummed out. I'm in the lower avgs range.
(mid 20s outside, upper 30s inside, barely hitting 40s inside )
So now the only thing I've been thinking about is another friggin upgrade.
I thought I was past that for a while. I've been putting money into my home theater stuff.
Too much knowledge can really be a fart in the face of blissful ignorance.
I guess I was thinking I'd have a better fps cause I get a 65-75 range in Counterstrike.
Oh well....guess I'll start pricing the local prices on AMD chips again.

Moral of the story kids: Be careful, you might not like what you read.

Sarge, the less than happy camper...

[KitZune]

Don't worry Sarge... those high numbers are just illusions anyhow... I'll teach you now how the mind and the eye precieves images.

Real life... your eye can only precieve up to roughly 60 FPS... That's the way you see in real life... 60FPS... Faster in some cases, slower in others (has to do with boredom, excitement, danger, and other events that can cause speed ups and slow downs in your eye's framerate.) But on average sitting playing a computer game for example, you can see 60 FPS.

MOVIES. It only takes 30FPS to make a very convincing movement on screen... You can only see the slow down when things aren't going to exciting in the movie... You can see it ... it looks a little jittery... This is because of your current boredom with the movie. However... at 30FPS... you will not notice slow down unless you're LOOKING for it.

TV screens work similarily they work at 24 FPS... however they show you two frames at a time through "Interlace" if you pause a video tape (more specifically an old video tape) you will see it flashing rather annoyingly and quickly... this is because when it's paused you can see both frames at once.

Well Tribes 2 is not interlaced it will need 30 FPS before it starts to look perfectly smooth... However 20 FPS is NOT that slow! You may only notice some jittery action... but it is completely ignorable. I suggest turning down some of your options.. I mean I have a pretty AWESOME system and all I did was turn most of the options down to the 3/4 mark and suddenly it was like Val-Halla baby! I even DOUBLED my screensize!

Lesson Learned: Do not spend money on getting your FPS up to 90... Because the difference between 60 and 90 is absolutely NOTHING because of the way the human eye works... But sure... a 90FPS earns you bragging rights.

[Ghryphen]

I get down to 5-15 when im in the middle of a good fight, like defending the MPB last night, when things really start hoppin with explotions and quad person fights, it really gets rough. I plan on upgrading to at least 1ghz soon, maybe 1.3.

[Aluscia]

I hate you BJ! I have to live with my hapapapapappy 533 MHZ processor... (I might be able to upgrade to a Pentium III 800 one day...*dream sequence music starts*)
At any rate, don't fret, Sarge. I'm sure I'll be somewhere in the low-nihilistic range... (like 10 fps)... Don't worry...

[KitZune]

Same advice to you, Gryphon... lower some of your stats... my Computer is not as good as yours and it runs a nice framerate almost all the time... except, as I said, after a few maps... which is happily because of tribes 2, and not my computer .

Also, Laurelin you should look out the Pentium 4 is starting to drop the prices of Pentium 3s... Not too shabby if you can get ahold of a sub-par P3... RAM will also help... I intend to upgrade my computer's ram sometime soon... fortunately ram chips are selling super-cheap right now.

The graphic options help *ALOT* they made sure the game could be useable on a lot of systems... But you will suffer only in how beautiful the game is.. As an avid player of the Original Nintendo, I believe game quality is better than graphic quality anyways... The game could look like Earthbound for all I care, as long as it has the same value of gaming in it as Earthbound did... Woooweee... Tribes 2 is a goldmine when it comes to game-play.

[Aluscia]

I might pick up some RAM, and a new processor... IF I get the job I want at Second Cup... /me drools.... Free coffee...
I mean, I would be doing it for the money... right... free coffee...

[Sgt Slaughter]

I know about the 30 fps and how your eyes handle it.
I studied a little bit of computer graphics and animation way back when.

But...what I'm thinking about is...the computers don't have this limit. And though we don't perceive the increase in framerate, the computer will. The mouse cursor will.
Is this not so? If you take one tenth of that second, you'll have 3 frames at 30fps and 9 at 90fps. That 9 frames has to be more accurate to the mouse cursor than 3 frames.
So your accuracy should increase, and visa versa, having a slower framerate makes you more vulnerable.

That being said, right or wrong, I may grab an Tbird 900 for now and upgrade my duron 750. They're still relatively cheap. But I want to upgrade everything to a 266 bus system. DDR memory has really dropped, and I just noticed AMD's with 266 bus's now. The new chip, memory and m/b now would be $400. I'm not ready for that yet, maybe over the summer?

Anyhoo....
I gotta get some lunch.
I'll get in some Tribing tonight, hope to cya guys there.
Sarge

[Ghryphen]

If anything, a better processor and ram will improve the long load times. I can tell a big difference in map loading from my PIII650 512ram, and my PIII450 128ram.

[Aluscia]

512 MB... That's a scary amount...

[Ambush_Bug]

Hrrrm... I dunno about you guys, but I CAN tell the difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS... about all the way up to 75 FPS or so on a good day.

I think a big hunk of it has to do with that neither of my eyes will ever be in synch with each other again (the right one has no lens-docs took it out years ago during a big messy cataract surgery).

There was also a study linked to human perception of FPS, which I cannot find for the life of me now. (figures I would forget ) BUT, there's a quick test of your own perception you can make; change your monitor's refresh rate to 60 Hz. If you don't see the flickering (and get a headache), then you can't tell the difference. If you DO see the flicker (like I do), crank it back up to 75 Hz or so to save your brain the pain.

Personally, I'm saving up for a GF3 here in the next few months. Bad as my eyesight is, I need all the raw visual quality I can get to be effective in battle.

BTW, an FPS tip... change your sky detail to SkyBox. Full Sky is cool looking, what with all the rolling clouds and stormbanks and the like, but maaaaan does it eat up the framerate. My average FPS went from 50 to 60 just from that setting alone. The nice thing is that SkyBox actually looks pretty good if you have decent texture settings--I can't see the seams at all unless I crank down my texture details.

Turning off Interior Fog will get you a few frames back as well.

[Gambit]

Actually, Kit, I used to think that your post was correct - the human eye can't percieve changes faster than 22 fps (or whatever it was), etc. But then I read an article, maybe the same one Bug is thinking of, that explained things a little better.

With a TV or movie camera, action that happens faster than the framerate of the camera is captured as a blur. Try doing a freeze-frame on a DVD sometime to catch some fast movement, and you'll see it.

Today's games can't or don't simulate the motion blur we would normally see, and so there IS a noticable difference between playing a game at 30 fps vs. twice that. I'm not sure where the limit is, but some think it's between 70-90. I DO know that I can see the flicker of a 60 Hz refresh rate, and it BUGS me.

[Dynomutt]

Originally posted by THZ*Sgt Slaughter


Too much knowledge can really be a fart in the face of blissful ignorance.

hehe can I use that?

[Aluscia]

I'm ignorant... But yeah, my Tribes fps sucks hardcore too... I'm playing around with things, like 16-bit texturing, and such... I hope things will work tonight.