Hey everyone The issue of varying FPS and its effect on creating an unfair playing field has been touched on before but not discussed fully. Until recently, I was under the impression that a higher FPS just provided an advantage because it was a smoother experience and you hypothetically could 'see' more. This doesn't appear to be the case.
I am sure most of you are aware of curb boosting, going over bumps/curbs and receiving a small speedboost. It appears as though the amount of speedboost you get depends on your FPS. Broughy1322 discusses it here
Lets be clear, curb boosting is far more impactful in races compared to the speedruns. In races, you plan out the map to make perfect turns which maximise the curb boosting. In a speedrun, your primary goal is dodging traffic while maintaining speed which does not easily allow for you to catch a great amount of curbs. It would hypothetically take dozens upon dozens of curb boosts to make up for even a single crash. Worth the risk in a few minutes race but not in a 6 hour speedrun.
However, there are exceptions to this which is what has brought this to my attention. The Franklin/Lamar drive has no traffic for example. This lack of traffic has allows a runner to catch effectively every curb possible. Recently I increased my graphics, thus reducing my FPS, and have found myself losing a second or so in this drive. Over the course of the entire speedrun, especially 100%, one could quickly imagine that a person with 60fps would lose a decent amount of time even from curbs just hit in passing compared to 144 fps.
Should we implement an FPS cap? What should this cap be? According to Draconis (a knowledgeable viewer of mine), these effects are most pronounced over 100fps. Another important factor is how would we enforce such a cap. Videos are recorded in 60fps, we wouldn't notice if someone had a higher fps cap.
Please put your thoughts below.
I play with under 60fps, I don’t mind. It is a few seconds, afterall. Everyone could technically get hardware for such fps so it’s not an unfair advantage. That is my opinion.
If enforcing FPS cap... With GTA V the vsync options works differently for different rigs. I guess if enforcing the 60fps cap they should have any sort of FPS overlay on the stream or video (Rivatuner, Geforce experience, just fraps demo should work too). If I'm getting this right if a guy with 144hz monitor would set vsync on at half, his cap would be at 72fps?
Rejecting runs due to not having an FPS counter on screen would be...quite lame. How do other GTAs do it?
60 fps looks garbage compared to 100 fps imo. 100 fps at the lowest graphics is not hard to obtain these days.
Old 3D gta's just have "Frame limiter" option. Stable 30 fps lock. Well San Andreas got that thing broken so it's locked at 25/26 depending on the version you use. No idea about GTA IV though.
I don't think that having an FPS counter would be big of an issue. Especially when a lot of people use nvidia gpu's or playing the game through steam.
I'm on the fence. A FPS cap would be a good way to regulate speedruns. On the other hand, I feel like making such a big rule/regulation decision over one trick would be a little crazy.
I will say, in my very little speedrun experience, that I have seen a similar forum discussion/dispute in Mario Kart 8 that talked about differing load times between digital and disc versions of the game (a few seconds). They knew that making the version of the game a rule would be outlandish, so they just added a submission variable.
My suggestion would be to make a submission variable so that FPS doesn't become a rule, but it also isn't ignored when submitting a run.
Its not a few seconds though, especially comparing <60 fps and 144 fps. At least with the loadless timer we could hypothetically know how much time was lost/saved comparing systems, we can't with this though.
My issue was always the enforcing of it. With the other GTAs, to my knowledge, you are able to see the fps differences. The physics act very differently at times. GTA V...not so much.
Screw it I guess. I don't want to be the guy chasing everyone down telling them to change. These are the sorts of things that should have been established 3 years ago. My game is going to look so bad going back to 144hz -.- I will try tomorrow.
fwiw, broughy and his racing crew set a cap of 60fps in most of their events to ensure everyone is on an even playing field. free programs such as dxtory and rivatuner can be used to limit and display fps on screen. the racing community has debated the fps question for a while now http://nodo.freeforums.net/thread/9694/fps-boosting and we haven't really reached a consensus on whether or not differences ranging from 60-144fps have a measurable impact on lap times. framerates in excess of ~150 seem to produce noticeably quicker times, however
