Way back in the day, every game had its logic tied to its framerate – As anyone who’s ever tried to run an eighties PC game on a nineties PC only to see it run at 20x speed and completely unplayable can tell you.
But in the modern day this is less common. Generally the game keeps chugging along at the same pace, no matter how fast or slow the frames are being presented (unless, of course, everything is bogged down so hard that even the game logic is struggling)
And yet, you’ll still find a few. Any fan of Dark Souls who played on PC back when Prepare to Die edition first came to PC will remember how unlocking the framerate could cause collision bugs and send you into the void. And I recently watched a video of a gent who massively overclocked a Nintendo Switch OLED and got Tears of the Kingdom to run at 60FPS… Except everything was, indeed, running in fast-forward, rather than just being smoother.
This makes me wonder – Is there some unseen advantage to keeping game logic and framerate tied together? Perhaps something that only really shows on weaker hardware? Or is it just devs going “well the hardware we’re targeting won’t really go over this speed, and we don’t really give a fuck about anything else” and not bothering to implement it?
Finally a correct answer!
Back in the day game logic was calculated each rebder-frame, because the hardware was too weak (say, C64).
Not tying the framerate to the logic “frames” makes for smoother user experience when the world gets hard to draw and your screen framerate goes down but your logic “frames” are still ticking on at the same speed.
Locking those two together today has no meaning with the possible exception of small simple cpu hand healds (say the Nintendo DS for example).