Frames Per Second
When talking about gaming and game play it is essential to talk about the frame rate, the number of frames that are displayed per second. A game without a high frame rate is simply not worth playing. Beautiful graphics, a good plot, and an innovative style can't make up for poor performance. Just imagine how thrilled you would be about your brand new Ferrari if it couldn't go past 55mph.
So, how important is the frame rate?
There has been a lot of debate about this and it simply not an easy answer. The "flicker fusion frequency", the frame rate at which you can no longer see individual images, varies from person to person, but the range of variation is between 24 and 30 fps. In fact we are quite comfortable with slower than 30 fps content. Here are 4 major standards that we have grown accustomed to: The old 8mm home movies clipped along at a blazing 16fps 72mm film flies of the reel at 24 fps. The European and Australian PAL TV standard broadcasts at 25 fps An in North America we are a bit spoiled (hard to figure that one out) with NTSC TV giving us the golden 30 fps. I personally thought I was a good judge of frame rate because I have always been sensitive to refresh rates, but I found that while I can tell the difference between 20fps and 24fps, the difference between 24fps and 30 fps was much harder to detect. After 30 fps you have more frames than you need to fool the brain; however, while people can't see the individual frames past 24-30 fps, if you keep increasing the frame rate, people report that the motion appears more fluid and lifelike. This effect has been found up to about 60 fps, where people will report totally fluid motion. So....if you don't need more than 30 fps to see things clearly, and 60 fps is totally fluid....
Why does everyone make such a big deal about high frame rates?
30 fps is not slow, but its not fast either- its bare minimum for fluid gameplay. When you do a benchmark test you are getting the average frame rate for the demo sequence that was played. While this may give you a result that looks good, it does not tell you whether this performance level will be acheivable with the gaming environment that you play in.
Why should I care if Quake runs at 100fps?
Lets take Quake as an example if you run the timedemo in quake and get 30 fps then you obviously have a solution that will play fine under normal circumstances. If, however, you try to play quake in multiplayer mode on the internet then you can expect some trouble. The problem is that in multiplayer there are potentially many more players in a particular room at the same time.Each player is made up of many polygons which makes the scene more complex Also players tend to move much faster than the usual monsters that you face which creates further complexity. All of this tends to lower the frame rate and instead of 30 fps you end up with 15fps. 15fps is bad, and is really, really bad when someone has a rocket launcher pointed at you. In a high speed game like quake you need high frame rates so you never get caught with low frames and get fraged.
"So, what can I do to increase my framerate?"
Obviously you can start by getting a fast 3D accelerator. fps is dedicated to helping you make the right choice for you. I don't believe that one card will fit all users. Choosing a card should be based not only on the benchmarks, but also on performance in the games that you want to play.
Here are some more tips to finding the best solution:
Faster CPU More memory 16mb min. 64mb rec. (and make sure you have 512k cache. SCSI (particularly if the games you play use the CD-ROM during the game. PCI sound card or sound card with memory. Defragment your hard drives. Make your swap file (virtual memory) a permanent fixed sized file. Move your swap file to a second hard drive if possible. Remove all possible programs from memory. To do this look for files loaded from the StartUp folder: c:/WINDOWS/startmenu/programs/startup/ And in the following "keys" in the registry (type "regedit" at the run command to edit the registry. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run HKEY_USERS\.efault\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
Vertical refresh rate
Vertical refresh rate is the number of times that the graphic card repaints the image on the monitor screen. The vertical refresh rate can also effect the performance of a 3D game. Most 3D titles are double-buffered, meaning that while the current frame is displayed to the monitor (the front buffer) the next frame to be displayed is in graphics card's memory buffer (the back buffer. The problem here is that most games will wait until the next vertical retrace starts before it sends the back buffer image to the front buffer. This process is called Vertical Sync (or vsync for short). The good news is that this delay helps keep the image stable, the bad news is that this delay causes delays as the timing will often be mismatched, and therefore, framerate is slowed. Many chipsets allow you to turn off the vysnc, and in the case of the 3Dfx Voodoo chipsets and the NVidia chipsets the result is still rather good. Other chipsets like the Intel i740 will tear the image badly and would not be playable solutions. (note that a frame does not have to change to be "refreshed" on the screen. In other words your frame rate will not always (and usually does not) match your refresh rate. While higher refresh rates can help decrease the buffer delay, it also takes more memory and this can cause problems with the buffer itself. While it is a good idea to try this it may not lead to increased performance.

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