Diamond Member Steam 0 Posted March 6, 2025 Diamond Member Share Posted March 6, 2025 This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up PC performance is something I'm passionate about, as cheesy as that might sound. In the nerdy, min-maxing kind of way, of course. In case you've previously come across This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up , this probably sounds quite self-apparent, but the same approach could be applied to a wealth of other related topics, too. There's a huge amount of nuance to how a game runs, and the more the gaming industry matures, the better we understand this specific aspect of game development. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean newer games perform better as a rule. Uh, quite the opposite, actually, if you consider This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . New games mean new rendering techniques, and the cutting-edge is not cheap to run. There's an entire science's worth of effort that goes into game optimization and performance measuring, and I genuinely think that knowing and understanding what goes into making a game performant is a crucial aspect of PC gaming. I can't shove an entire industry's worth of performance understanding into a single article, obviously. What I can do, however, is to try and explain how to make a game perform smoothly. Or, if you will, how I believe "good performance" should be measured. This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up ? I've been repeating this over and over again to anyone who listens, but frame rate alone is not a good quantifier of how well a game will run. If you're relying exclusively on average frame rate for performance assessment, as benchmarking often does, you're using an outdated and frankly inadequate measurement that barely tells you half the story of what's actually going on. Instead, you need (at least!) frame rate and frame time information via preferably a graph UI. MSI Afterburner still works great in this respect, if you need it. The rule of thumb is that no matter your frame rate, your frame-time graph needs to be as flat as possible. Spikes indicate stutters and performance issues, and unless the game is deeply broken or running on This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up , the way to get around these spikes is to play around with your graphics settings and change your FPS target. An objectively good performance isn't even that hard to achieve. At least, not on paper. Here's my first hot take, though: removing the cap from your frame rate and going ham isn't a good time for the average gamer. Personal preferences and all that, yes, but you really want your frame time graph to be as stable and flat as possible. This isn't happening when you've got one scene rendering at 200 FPS while the other drops you as low as 80. Good performance, as a term, should be used to describe a situation in which a game can always hit its target frame rate at an appropriate frame time. Surely you've noticed by now that not every game properly caps out at 60 FPS, right? You're only getting a perfectly silky smooth 60 FPS if there's exactly 16.67ms between each rendered frame, and since human eyes expect consistency, that's what makes certain games performant. This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Wrapping it up Let me reiterate something I mentioned at the start of this diatribe: I've only just scratched the surface of good video game performance here. I've barely touched upon This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up , for example, and how it effectively enables variable frame rates without screen-tearing. Or how you can This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up to fine-tune your frame rate caps per-game to a greater extent than actual GPU driver software allows you to. There's a wealth of tools we can use to truly fine-tune what our hardware does and how games are rendered. Back in the day, on the other hand, all we really had to go on when it comes to performance assessment was Fraps: a crummy frame rate counter that was honestly quite wrong half the time. Now? You can have actual frame-time graphs drawn for you in-game, allowing you not just to see why your 120 FPS gameplay feels like trawling through mud but also making it easy to pinpoint what might be causing your latency spikes. With so many of these applications at our disposal, why aren't more of us using them to actually tune our games for perfect, rock-solid performance instead of going after the highest frame rate possible? Give my advice a shot, either way. I don't think you'll be disappointed with what you find. The post This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up appeared first on This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . 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