30 or 60 FPS ?

So it occurred to me that perhaps forcing 60 fps over 30 fps might make my game "less compatible" with older systems, or systems that have low specs.

Does it matter if I use 60 over 30 ? What are some pitfalls ?

thx :)

If you use 60 then as you said your game will be unstable on older machines. If you use 30 it may be too chopy. I would use 50.

Unstable in what way? If you use some decent timing code there won't be any problems and the frame rate will go as fast as it can. See Mark's castle demo that comes with Blitz3D.

I've always used 30FPS for 3D stuff. No problems at all if you plan it like that from the start.

There's no reason to ever try to fix the frame rate to 50FPS. What monitor refreshes at 50Hz?

ok ok sorry

to me 30 fps does look choppy IDK why it doesn't to you

I don't use 60 because when I run a game with a high fps like that, it will randomly jump between 60 and 30 fps on my old machine.

50 has worked for me so far IDK maybe your right on that one.

Its all a matter of personal preference

Not really, its more to do with how you code it.

If your frame rate is jumping all over the place then you're doing something pretty badly wrong.

I don't know why people should code in the frame limiting.

Why not use the internal WaitTimer() command?

I am using the tween framework in the "castle" demo for my frame timing.

Is it good to use? Should I indeed only go for 30 fps...??

Well unless you've found a way to use WaitTimer with negative values to go back in time, it isn't going to help you when your computer can't keep up with the desired frequency. It also wastes all the available time it has if it can go faster than required, rather than putting it to good use. Short of no timing at all, it's probably the worst solution.


That depends on your needs. If you're not using a physics engine and your logic is pretty straightforward, then it'll be fine. If you're using a physics engine, you'll probably either want to go higher than that or tell the physics engine to update in multiple small steps. If you're doing a lot of your own physics, again you'll probably want to go higher. If you've got a lot of heavy duty logic which takes a long time to run and very little in the way of physics, you may even want to go lower.