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?
Easier to code. You don’t need to worry about render interval and tick interval, as they’re both part of the game loop, resulting in a lot less code.
Once computers became too fast for this to be a practical approach, tick intervals became more common. That way, the Game would run at the same speed on any computer that was fast enough.
After a while, as graphics generally became more complex, it became apparent that the game logic was rarely what was taking up much of the calculation, so to avoid graphics slowing down the entire game, render intervals became a thing. Basically this allowed the game to run at normal speed, at then just let the graphics update as fast as they could if it couldn’t keep up.