30FPS patched to 60FPS

[caddi daddi]

I have a very old game I really enjoy, it was released in 1999 or so, it's so old it's dx7.
there are many mods and patches for it and one is to increase the frame rate from 30 fps to 60 fps.
how do they do that? display each frame twice?????

 

[Janus67]

Generally just unlock the framerate

 

[caddi daddi]

so it's not just some silly smoke and mirrors, it really doubles the number of unique frames?
the game is smoother at 60fps so it does actually work, I'm kind of surprised at that, I would have thought that each frame was fixed data.

 

[Janus67]

That is where it depends. Sometimes yes and sometimes no, in some games when the frames are stuck to a certain FPS and unlocking past that everything goes in fast forward (look here for recent release (NFS: Rivals) that has the gist of that [warning: nsfw language] ).

Other times the game's physics and speed aren't dependent on the framerate and can have a smoother experience at a higher framerate. Benchmarks like 3dmark/etc have fixed frames (thus if you run something that is quite old - 3dmark01, aquamark) it will seem like it is in fast forward because of the thousands of FPS that it is doing.

 

[caddi daddi]

is the machine able to increase the frame rate because it says make this pixel this color and that pixel that color and not just slap this picture on the screen?

 

[Janus67]

Basically yes.

 

[caddi daddi]

real basic is what I need to understand.