5 ms·

Readers may prefer the original post by the programmer behind the rewrite: https://phoboslab.org/log/2023/08/rewriting-wipeout https://phoboslab.org/log/2023/08

Readers may prefer the original post by the programmer behind the rewrite: https://phoboslab.org/log/2023/08/rewriting-wipeout https://phoboslab.org/log/2023/08/rewriting-wipeout

_a_a_a_ 3y ago
I'm sorry, 6,000 FPS? How is that possible?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mmastrac 3y ago
  The code was probably hyper-optimized for decade+ old hardware.
  - db48x 3y ago
    No, it wasn’t hyper–optimized, it just doesn’t draw many triangles or use many light sources. There is simply a lot less for the renderer to do than in a modern game.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  It means it's calculating 6000 frames per second, but all of them don't need to make it to the screen. On a 60hz screen, every 100th frame calculated would actually be displayed. (If we assume a perfect 6000fps, the video shows fluctuations between 4000fps-7000fps. If you just mean how can it be so high in general? Old, well optimized, games run really well on faster modern hardware. I remember getting over 1,000 fps in Guild Wars 1 on a GTX 1060 when looking at an area with no monsters/NPCs. edit( this paragraph doesn't apply here) ~~The PS1 also doesn't have floating point math, mostly everything is done in fixed point with integer math which is obscenely fast compared to floating point (it could also simulate an FPU if the precision is absolutely necessary but that's not suitable for realtime)~~ Just read further down the article that they converted it to float. I guess the game is just super optimized. I would have thought fixed point savings factored in here.
  - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
    > all of them don't need to make it to the screen ah gotcha, thanks. The bandwidth would have to be terabytes/sec. Come to think of it, pretty dumb of me to think they did.
    - squeaky-clean 3y ago
      Nah, most people would probably not think of unseen frames being generated unless you're into studying your graphics performance. It also technically does make a difference in some games. Even if the frames don't make it to the screen, if your mouse polls at 1000hz then you can get more precise input tracking by rendering up to 1000fps. It's something only really noticeable to professional gamers. But pro CSGO players are positive they can feel an improvement when running at fps more than double their monitor rate.
      - kmeisthax 3y ago
        Also keep in mind that games don't run at a constant FPS. The "FPS" stat that we talk about is an average of the time each frame took to process and render, 1/x. But we can also talk about deviation from that average, which is where you get "1% low" and "0.1% low" stats. If your 1%s or 0.1%s dip below your monitor refresh rate, that becomes microstutter, which is way more noticeable than a reduction in the average frame time. Wanting to have FPS at 2x your monitor's refresh rate will[0] provide a significant safety margin against frames that take too long to render. I will also point out that this 2x rule came into the community before we had adaptive sync, so the alternative would be turning off vsync in the vain hope that microstutter would get lost in the tearing. For the record, "microstutter" wasn't really a common thing people talked about until fairly recently, so I'm kind of applying today's more scientific analysis of game performance to things that back then were largely superstitions that happened to work. [0] Assuming a fast CPU and GPU drivers worth using
        spookie 3y ago
        Very much true, just wanted to add something. In the before times, games would be running on pure forward renderers. Which, in turn, would mitigate many of the the frame timing inconsistencies of the more complex pipelines of today! Some still do that, of course. With the exception that we aren't relying in fixed function hw anymore!
- lunchdetail 3y ago
  They're talking about the speed of the internal engine, not the display. So the display could still only be showing 60 frames to the user each second (or 120, or anything) but the internal engine is running at 6000fps. Plenty (maybe nearly all?) of games do this because modern engines decouple the engine speed from the display speed. In older systems where you knew the engine was only going to run for a specific game on specific hardware (e.g. a SNES or GameCube or PlayStation), and you knew you were always going to be targeting 30fps, no more no less, you could pretty safely assume the game would _always_ run at 30fps and could use a "frame" as a unit of time. So if you want some in-game action like a melee attack to take 1 second, you could just count 30 frames and you would know it was 1 second long. But if somehow this game was later run at 60fps, that same attack would now only take .5 seconds, since there were twice as many frames in a second now. So if you took a game like this meant for 30fps and ran it at 60, everything would just run twice as fast. You wouldn't actually be able to play the original game at anything higher than the original frame rate. What they're saying here is that they decoupled the two, where originally they were coupled. So now the game can run at high fps and feel smoother than the original lower fps rate, but the gameplay is still at the original intended speed.
  - bityard 3y ago
    Interesting twist: Wipeout XL/2097 for PC was a terrifically bad port, and the game speed was proportional to how fast your video card could draw the 3D scene, just as you describe. There was a patch at some point to fix this, but honestly just easier to load the game up in a PSX emulator these days.
tomcam 3y ago
Everything about that article is delightful. Author is way too modest to point out that it’s a stunning achievement.

Readers may prefer the original post by the programmer behind the rewrite: https://phoboslab.org/log/2023/08/rewriting-wipeout https://phoboslab.org/log/2023/08/rewriting-wipeout

_a_a_a_ 3y ago

I'm sorry, 6,000 FPS? How is that possible?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mmastrac 3y ago
The code was probably hyper-optimized for decade+ old hardware.
- db48x 3y ago
  No, it wasn’t hyper–optimized, it just doesn’t draw many triangles or use many light sources. There is simply a lot less for the renderer to do than in a modern game.
squeaky-clean 3y ago
It means it's calculating 6000 frames per second, but all of them don't need to make it to the screen. On a 60hz screen, every 100th frame calculated would actually be displayed. (If we assume a perfect 6000fps, the video shows fluctuations between 4000fps-7000fps. If you just mean how can it be so high in general? Old, well optimized, games run really well on faster modern hardware. I remember getting over 1,000 fps in Guild Wars 1 on a GTX 1060 when looking at an area with no monsters/NPCs. edit( this paragraph doesn't apply here) ~~The PS1 also doesn't have floating point math, mostly everything is done in fixed point with integer math which is obscenely fast compared to floating point (it could also simulate an FPU if the precision is absolutely necessary but that's not suitable for realtime)~~ Just read further down the article that they converted it to float. I guess the game is just super optimized. I would have thought fixed point savings factored in here.
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  > all of them don't need to make it to the screen ah gotcha, thanks. The bandwidth would have to be terabytes/sec. Come to think of it, pretty dumb of me to think they did.
  - squeaky-clean 3y ago
    Nah, most people would probably not think of unseen frames being generated unless you're into studying your graphics performance. It also technically does make a difference in some games. Even if the frames don't make it to the screen, if your mouse polls at 1000hz then you can get more precise input tracking by rendering up to 1000fps. It's something only really noticeable to professional gamers. But pro CSGO players are positive they can feel an improvement when running at fps more than double their monitor rate.
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      Also keep in mind that games don't run at a constant FPS. The "FPS" stat that we talk about is an average of the time each frame took to process and render, 1/x. But we can also talk about deviation from that average, which is where you get "1% low" and "0.1% low" stats. If your 1%s or 0.1%s dip below your monitor refresh rate, that becomes microstutter, which is way more noticeable than a reduction in the average frame time. Wanting to have FPS at 2x your monitor's refresh rate will[0] provide a significant safety margin against frames that take too long to render. I will also point out that this 2x rule came into the community before we had adaptive sync, so the alternative would be turning off vsync in the vain hope that microstutter would get lost in the tearing. For the record, "microstutter" wasn't really a common thing people talked about until fairly recently, so I'm kind of applying today's more scientific analysis of game performance to things that back then were largely superstitions that happened to work. [0] Assuming a fast CPU and GPU drivers worth using
      - spookie 3y ago
        Very much true, just wanted to add something. In the before times, games would be running on pure forward renderers. Which, in turn, would mitigate many of the the frame timing inconsistencies of the more complex pipelines of today! Some still do that, of course. With the exception that we aren't relying in fixed function hw anymore!
lunchdetail 3y ago
They're talking about the speed of the internal engine, not the display. So the display could still only be showing 60 frames to the user each second (or 120, or anything) but the internal engine is running at 6000fps. Plenty (maybe nearly all?) of games do this because modern engines decouple the engine speed from the display speed. In older systems where you knew the engine was only going to run for a specific game on specific hardware (e.g. a SNES or GameCube or PlayStation), and you knew you were always going to be targeting 30fps, no more no less, you could pretty safely assume the game would _always_ run at 30fps and could use a "frame" as a unit of time. So if you want some in-game action like a melee attack to take 1 second, you could just count 30 frames and you would know it was 1 second long. But if somehow this game was later run at 60fps, that same attack would now only take .5 seconds, since there were twice as many frames in a second now. So if you took a game like this meant for 30fps and ran it at 60, everything would just run twice as fast. You wouldn't actually be able to play the original game at anything higher than the original frame rate. What they're saying here is that they decoupled the two, where originally they were coupled. So now the game can run at high fps and feel smoother than the original lower fps rate, but the gameplay is still at the original intended speed.
- bityard 3y ago
  Interesting twist: Wipeout XL/2097 for PC was a terrifically bad port, and the game speed was proportional to how fast your video card could draw the 3D scene, just as you describe. There was a patch at some point to fix this, but honestly just easier to load the game up in a PSX emulator these days.

tomcam 3y ago

Everything about that article is delightful. Author is way too modest to point out that it’s a stunning achievement.