At least for GameCube games, I think it would be a good idea to add framerate/limit information to the game's wiki page. For example some games, like Batman Vengeance, run natively at 60Hz, while others, like Spider-Man 2, are stuck to 30Hz and require an AR/Gecko Code or patch to run at 60Hz.
I think this would be really useful if you're looking to play at 60Hz but unsure if the game will run at 60Hz or if you'll have to hunt down a hack of some kind. Could we start adding this information to the wiki? I can add info for the games I have.
I'm pretty sure all NTSC games run at 60Hz, but the framerate is what's locked.
NTSC-U and NTSC-J games are locked at 60 Hz and often run at 20, 30 or 60 FPS. 20 FPS was mostly used during the Nintendo 64 era. I don't think there is any GameCube or Wii game that still runs at 20 FPS.
PAL games are set to 50 Hz and since the GameCube came with the option to run at 60 Hz as well... If the dev decided to add support for it. There were plenty of PAL games still locked at 50 Hz. 50 Hz mode have their FPS 5/6 times slower than in 60 Hz. So 20 FPS becomes roughly 16,7 FPS, 30 FPS becomes 25 FPS and 60 FPS becomes 50 FPS.
We once did try to track this for a limited set of titles. Part of the reason we've now omitted it is the possible inconsistency of framerates across regional releases. Even folks with fairly complete game collections, infrequently cover all the regional releases; which makes testing difficult. Earlier in Dolphins development it was also difficult to confirm if framerates observed were related to framerate limiting, or performance issues with the emulating PC; though that's less of a concern today.
We'd be happy to discuss a proposal for tracking framerates on the wiki, keep in mind:
- It will need to account for tracking separate framerates per region (or perhaps just PAL vs NTCS if we can be assured there aren't other regional differences)
- There will need to be some commitment to populate it for more than a handful of titles (that's a lot of work, with 730 GC, 1,693 Wii, and 462 WiiWare tiles, 2,885 in total + the VC titles)
- Will need to standardlize the expected framerates (Admedus's comment provides some insight to the complexities of such)
(09-25-2019, 08:59 AM)Kolano Wrote: [ -> ]We'd be happy to discuss a proposal for tracking framerates on the wiki, keep in mind:
- It will need to account for tracking separate framerates per region (or perhaps just PAL vs NTCS if we can be assured there aren't other regional differences)
- There will need to be some commitment to populate it for more than a handful of titles (that's a lot of work, with 730 GC, 1,693 Wii, and 462 WiiWare tiles, 2,885 in total + the VC titles)
- Will need to standardlize the expected framerates (Admedus's comment provides some insight to the complexities of such)
That all makes perfect sense, I'm not sure how we could go about coordinating something like that, but I'd be happy to contribute whatever I can.
For formatting, I'd suggest maybe adding it to the bottom of the infobox, above the "see also" section. Maybe have it act sort of like a table, with the FPS listed per Game ID, like so:
Framerates: FOOE11: 60Hz
FOOP11: 50Hz
FOOD11: Unknown
etc
One other complexity, which ExtremeDude2's list reminded me of, is that some games use multiple framerates. So the framerate in menu's may be 60hz, while game play is at 30hz. I think things like the emulated titles in Animal Crossing likely add additional oddities.
It's these sorts of complexities that caused us to avoid covering this on the wiki. Again, I'd be open to suggestions on how me can handle it, but it's complicated.
Makes sense. Well here's a thought, what if we put this info into the same area we put the AR/Gecko codes in? Like under Enhancements, in the 60 FPS section, or make it a Framerate section, and put the info there by region above any relevant higher framerate codes?
Might be a good idea to list games that doesn't keep 60fps as well, for games like Sonic Adventure DX it runs at 60fps but drops it in many scenes, in this case we can set GC CPU OC to 200% to do the trick, so it will run 60fps without any drops.
There are games that drops the framerate on the console but on dolphin is locked 60fps, like New Super Mario Bros., it doesn't drop the fps because in that game the bottleneck is the console GPU, dolphin is not affected by those, so on dolphin it will only drop fps when the bottleneck is the console CPU.
I'd imagine the people interested in making 60FPS codes would already be able to notice a game not already running at 60FPS. I don't see this as completely necessary, but it's always nice to know.