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What does ‘good performance’ really mean in the context of PC gaming?
Performance is a hotly contested topic in gaming, much like visual fidelity. Some feel 30 FPS is fine, while others aren't happy unless they get upwards of 120 at maximum settings. The truth is, as usual, smack-dab in the middle, but it's not entirely straightforward. 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 my AI frame generation explainer here at Destructoid, 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 crummy releases such as Monster Hunter Wilds. 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. When does a game perform well? 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relying exclusively on average frame rate for performance assessment, as benchmarking often does, you're using an outdated and frankly inadequate measurement that barely tells you half the story of what's actually going on.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 Unreal Engine 5, 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. How much FPS is enough FPS? The more FPS you get, the better. That's always going to be the case. The more nuanced and practical assessment, however, is once again that consistency is a crucial part of it. And so we come to my second hot take of the day: your FPS cap should be just under whatever your lowest average frame rate in a game is. Optimizing your graphics settings on PC is all about balance. Let's say you've got a 120 Hz display that you want to fully saturate while playing a certain game. Your first goal should be to see if you can't hit the 120 FPS target, of course, but if you're closer to 80 or 90 FPS most of the time my recommendation is to call it quits and go for a 60 FPS cap instead. Crank those settings up a tad, and I promise you'll have a better experience at a stable 60 than you would if your FPS was all over the place but closer to 120. I say 60 FPS, specifically, because in this example we've got a 120 Hz display. At 120 Hz, your performance targets should simply be 120, 60, 40, and 30 FPS depending on what your hardware can reach in a given game. Your monitor's refresh rate has to be able to evenly divide your rendered frames for your frame-times to be stable and constant. 60 FPS will look awful on a locked 144 Hz display because the display will render each frame twice and then some. You do not want this. Your frames should be displayed in extremely even intervals, with each staying on-screen for precisely the same amount of time. The alternative is a nasty, cyclical stutter that won't go away. All of this is to say that you don't actually want too much FPS unless you're a competitive gamer. Instead, figure out what pe
Performance is a hotly contested topic in gaming, much like visual fidelity. Some feel 30 FPS is fine, while others aren't happy unless they get upwards of 120 at maximum settings. The truth is, as usual, smack-dab in the middle, but it's not entirely straightforward.
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 my AI frame generation explainer here at Destructoid, 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 crummy releases such as Monster Hunter Wilds. 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.
When does a game perform well?
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 Unreal Engine 5, 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.
How much FPS is enough FPS?
The more FPS you get, the better. That's always going to be the case. The more nuanced and practical assessment, however, is once again that consistency is a crucial part of it. And so we come to my second hot take of the day: your FPS cap should be just under whatever your lowest average frame rate in a game is.
Optimizing your graphics settings on PC is all about balance. Let's say you've got a 120 Hz display that you want to fully saturate while playing a certain game. Your first goal should be to see if you can't hit the 120 FPS target, of course, but if you're closer to 80 or 90 FPS most of the time my recommendation is to call it quits and go for a 60 FPS cap instead. Crank those settings up a tad, and I promise you'll have a better experience at a stable 60 than you would if your FPS was all over the place but closer to 120.
I say 60 FPS, specifically, because in this example we've got a 120 Hz display. At 120 Hz, your performance targets should simply be 120, 60, 40, and 30 FPS depending on what your hardware can reach in a given game. Your monitor's refresh rate has to be able to evenly divide your rendered frames for your frame-times to be stable and constant.
60 FPS will look awful on a locked 144 Hz display because the display will render each frame twice and then some. You do not want this. Your frames should be displayed in extremely even intervals, with each staying on-screen for precisely the same amount of time. The alternative is a nasty, cyclical stutter that won't go away.
All of this is to say that you don't actually want too much FPS unless you're a competitive gamer. Instead, figure out what performance target looks the best to you and remains achievable with your hardware, cap your frame rate to that specific target, and you're golden.
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 technologies such as G-Sync, for example, and how it effectively enables variable frame rates without screen-tearing. Or how you can use RivaTuner 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 What does ‘good performance’ really mean in the context of PC gaming? appeared first on Destructoid.
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