Advantages of SNES hardware vs. Genesis hardware

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Originally Posted by evildragon

That's evading the question at hand. What was being stated was that Sonic 2 does NOT drop below 60fps when jumping in the trees.

When in fact, if it's updating every 3 frames, that means about 20fps is what is actually making it to the TV screen.

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Rate has a radically different defintion than speed. How fast do you think the crime rate in the U.S. is?

Many Genesis games update at 1fps without suffering slowdown. Thus is why hand drawn animation is measured at rates like 1's or 2's. Because the fastest you can animate is one frame per frame of video/film. Depending on the speed of movement, the distance between frames will be different, but the rate of animation is the same.

Framerate drop terms became popular to describe when 3D graphics would update at a different rate at the same speed. If a new frame was drawn for every one yard of movement and it dropped to every two yards, then it's called a lower frame rate, even though the speed is the same. When a 3D game like PSU 360 slows down, no frames of movement are lost. The gane only slows down.

Whether it's true or not, I've heard programners mention several times that slowdown is actually something programmed into games, to keep the frame rate the same. In 2D games you can still make platform jumps if the game runs slower, but you can't if frames are skipped. 60fps is only the top speed TVs could display at and as such, the smoothest games were programned to animate around.

It doesn't drop to 20fps, it's still updating the screen 60 times a second, it's just taking longer to update positions. If it was dropping frames it wouldn't slowdown, Sonic would just move across the screen in a very choppy way.

The difference in a modern example would be like a FPS vs the 360 version of Phantasy Star Universe. The 360 version of PSU always runs at 60fps, but the game slows down during more intense action. The game doesn't get any more choppy, it retains it's smoothness, things just move slower. Meanwhile in a game like Left 4 Dead when the horde of zombies comes at you the game will drop from 60fps to possibly 30-45fps and it looks very choppy. Things don't get slower, they just get very choppy. Sonic 2 is more like Phantasy Star Universe in that things don't get more choppy, they just slow down.

EDIT: That's kind of odd that we both came up with the same example...

We are on different pages here. Of course the TV is 60hz. But for a frame update every 3 frames, that's 20fps. Yes the game slows down too, but we no longer have 60fps.

You're not actually losing frames though. You're not getting 20fps, you are still getting 60fps. The objects positions are just being updated slower. If the game truly dropped to 20fps you'd be losing frames and things would get choppy. Think Sega Touring Car Championship on the Saturn.

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Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118

It doesn't drop to 20fps, it's still updating the screen 60 times a second

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If its not missing any frames, and the game is running 1/3rd the speed, then that is 60 frames every 3 seconds, 20fps

EDIT: Misread Thenewguys post.

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Originally Posted by evildragon

We are on different pages here. Of course the TV is 60hz. But for a frame update every 3 frames, that's 20fps. Yes the game slows down too, but we no longer have 60fps.

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Games don't update everything at 60fps before the effect we are all talking about, so fps are irelevant. Each d-pad press equals the same, unlike a franerate drop. The game just slows down.

The other term I don't being used for different things is "lag". To me lag is when multiple people are playing the same game, but not exactly in realtime. Some people use lag to describe framerate drops and slowdown. It doesn't matter if you can break down a phenomenon and show how lag describes a mechanism of it. If you end up using the same term for three different phenomenons then it defeats the purpose of using terms to sum anything up in the first place.

This's exactly my point. Sonic 2, megaman 3, and other 2d games suffer from slowdown. But games like starfox on the snes suffer from framerate drop. Slowdown never bothered me, in fact I enjoy it. However framerate drop always annoyed me.

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Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118

It doesn't drop to 20fps, it's still updating the screen 60 times a second, it's just taking longer to update positions. If it was dropping frames it wouldn't slowdown, Sonic would just move across the screen in a very choppy way.

The difference in a modern example would be like a FPS vs the 360 version of Phantasy Star Universe. The 360 version of PSU always runs at 60fps, but the game slows down during more intense action. The game doesn't get any more choppy, it retains it's smoothness, things just move slower. Meanwhile in a game like Left 4 Dead when the horde of zombies comes at you the game will drop from 60fps to possibly 30-45fps and it looks very choppy. Things don't get slower, they just get very choppy. Sonic 2 is more like Phantasy Star Universe in that things don't get more choppy, they just slow down.

EDIT: That's kind of odd that we both came up with the same example...

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Originally Posted by Thenewguy

If its not missing any frames, and the game is running 1/3rd the speed, then that is 60 frames every 3 seconds, 20fps

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Exactly.

This is like saying a 24fps movie being played on a 60hz TV is a movie being played at 60fps just because the TV updates 60 times a seconds.

For a framerate to drop from 60fps to 20fps means that 2/3 of your frames are now getting dropped. That is not whats happening in Sonic. All the frames are still there and being drawn you are just now receiving the same one 3 times in a row. The frame rate doesn't drop, the game slows down it's animation and movement speeds. There's a difference. Dropping to 20fps would result in everything still moving the same speed, but you only saw 1/3 of the frames that got it from Point A to Point B. Sonic doesn't do this, it just slows down and gives you a duplicate frame for the other 2 frames instead of just dropping them and skipping ahead.

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Originally Posted by evildragon

This is like saying a 24fps movie being played on a 60hz TV is a movie being played at 60fps just because the TV updates 60 times a seconds.

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No it's not. It's a 60fps video being slowed down. While yes the number of unique frames per second is now lower, you are not actually losing frames. A frame rate drop would be taking that 60fps video and removing 40 frames each second and playing it back. The result would be a video that runs in the same amount of time but is choppier due to there being less frames. There is a difference. Calling them the same thing is not accurate because they are two different things. Sonic has slowdown, not frame rate drops.

"Screen refresh rate is 60 Hz." -> Right.
"The frame is updated every 3 screen refreshes in NTSC, it's 20 fps." -> Right.
"The game is now cycling the character's animation using just 4 frames instead of 8 like in the beginning of the stage, it's dropping frames." -> Right.

"It has slowdowns, resulting in screen refreshes that maintain the same frame but it's still 60 fps." -> Wrong.
"The lower framerate means that it's dropping frames." -> Wrong, you can't say that just looking at the framerate.

It's the difference between a Framerate Drop and Slowdown Barone. For the frame rate to drop from 60 fps to 20 fps would mean we lose 2/3 of the frames. For the frame rate to slowdown to 20 fps is different and is what Sonic 2 does.

When Sonic slows down, it takes 3 seconds to get all 60 unique frames you would have gotten before in 1 second, and it takes 3 seconds for Sonic to move a certain distance. But you still get all 60 unique frames eventually. If Sonic were to drop to a frame rate of 20 fps, you would only get 20 frames in total. Sonic would still move that same distance in 1 second as he would in the above scenario in 3 seconds, but you would have lost 40 of the frames that would have shown you more detail.

Does that make sense? I admit this got a bit messy along the way but what's trying to be described here is that Slowdown and frame rate drops are different things, and you shouldn't swap the terms.

Trekkies I'm pretty sure I put my stuff in a clearer way.

Frame rate, frame drop and screen refresh are all different things. You guys are mixing those concepts IMO.

Frame rate is about number of unique frames in a closed period of time (1 second when you use fps), so there's no "eventually" shit. If it has only 1 unique frame every 3 screen refreshes in 60 Hz, it's just 20 fps. The rest is bs.

Trekkies>I'm afraid there is a problem in your logic...
If sonic takes 3 seconds to get what it does in 1 second normally (60 frames) then that does means that 60 frames are now extended to 3 seconds so 20 fps (20 frames per second).

I think you are mistaking 2 different games engine logic..
There is a *big* difference with games that actually handle sort of "automatic frame rate" and games that does not do it. Usually only games that use heavy and irregular rendering performance use the first method and only in these games you can have some frame drops (some display frame miss) but with a constant gameplay still run at normal speed. Honestly you have only a very game using that type of engine on 16 bits system, we usually saw that for PC games where hardware can differ a lot depending the user... To start with it is more difficult to handle game engine that way as you have to separate game logic from the game rendering, also almost 16 bits games runs at a constant frame rate so there is no need for that...
Starfox could be a good example of a game which could use it as it has irregular display refresh but i believe that if you overclock the super FX, not only the frame rate is better but algo the gameplay is faster (this game probably uses a cheated engine) :-/
Anyway even if game logic speed is constant or not, the screen refresh rate, in both case, drop from 60fps to 30fps or even less..