Couldn't wait. Legs went numb. Question for devs: (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Wednesday, May 31, 2017, 11:55 (2823 days ago) @ Kahzgul

At the very end, they say 60 FPS is quadruple the work of 30 FPS. Can someone explain why?

Depends on the game engine and how it's set up. I can imagine a way this would be the case, but it's pure conjecture on my part; I've never seen their code:

Destiny did some very (VERY) clever things in order to squeeze every ounce of juice out of the hardware it was running on (this is true), and some of that had to do with multithreading actions to be calculated separately from the graphics render (also true). So, in essence (this next bit is conjecture based on the two previous facts), Destiny is "drawing" the physics and AI and a third thing (netcode?) at the same time that it's drawing the graphics, (and now we're entering the land of complete and total speculation) so doubling the refresh rate necessarily means doubling the rate at which all of those other things happen as well, lest they become oddly jittery in an otherwise fluid world.

There was an old episode of the Giant Bombcast where one of their guests was discussing the challenges of hitting 60FPS. My memory of the details is hazey, but the basic gist of what he was saying is that there are many different things that happen when your engine renders each frame, and as a developer you only have the ability to speed up some of those things. These elements may include, but not be limited to, hardware bottlenecks (the amount of time it takes one part of the console to talk to another part).

Whatever those fixed elements are, they are fixed. Can't be sped up anymore. So if they are taking up 20% of the time between frames at 30fps, that means they would take up 40% of the time between frames at 60FPS. So the processes that CAN be sped up by the devs need to go way more than twice as fast to hit 60FPS over 30FPS.