FPS 30 and about FPS 60?

[TkSilver]

This is one of the better explinations about PCSX2 and the speed indicator. (Also sidenote interesting I can cross forum quote.... this is from the PCSX2 forum thread Why dose the FPS NEED to be 60????!

(12-24-2017 05:18 PM)pandubz Wrote:  The thing to remember here is the difference between refresh rates. There's going to be three major ones to note.

Tick rate: Not sure if this is the technical term, but we see this frequently in modern games like Battlefield 4 and Minecraft. This is the speed at which a game internally cycles. Completely separate from FPS, this is the actual cyclerate of game code that is running internally.

Internal frame rate: The FPS we're all used to with PC games. When the steam overlay says a game is pushing out 60 FPS, that's the rate that the game itself is generating new frames at. Whether your GPU ultimately decides to put those frames up on your monitor is based on the timing of these frames, and that's where vsync starts being important in preventing screen tearing, and also...

Your monitor's refresh rate: Regardless of a game's internal FPS, or tick rate, your monitor is constantly running its own FPS. Typically this is 59, 60, or 144 on modern monitors. Unlike tick rates and internal FPS, this does not fluctuate (or if it does something has probably gone horribly wrong).

In PCSX2's case, that FPS counter is the "Monitor refresh rate" of the pseudo TV that the emulator is "plugged in to". A real TV would run at 60 FPS, even if it's only being fed 20 FPS, and it just fills the holes by repeating frames.

System slowdowns make the FPS drop because those frames can't be fully rendered/repeated before the next batch of frames needs to go out. It's messy because you have all three of these layers, buried inside the emulator, which has these three layers for itself. But hopefully this makes enough sense.

Basically PCSX2 does show the refresh rate of 60 because TV's from when the PS2 was a popular thing were only 60HZ (well europe was 50HZ and to be fair it is 59.94Hz for NTSC). The PSP is using a LCD which supports a variable refresh rate. So instead of wasting processor cycles\memory showing a duplicate frame if a game could not handle 60fps the PSP programmers could just lower the refresh rate instead.

This is also the reason why all retro systems (non portable ones) are technically 60\50FPS systems... because the hardware (TVs) people were using required them to be. Though many other tricks were used if a game outstripped the hardware.