Thread: how do they do it?

they use 3d accelerator graphic cards.

Isnt it 24FPS for movies? Anywho, I read an article once that was saying something about how a movie may look smooth, but a game at 24FPS would have a slightly noticable slowdown...not sure though.

The human eye works at 18 fps. The reason it notices issues with higher frame rates is because the eye is not synchronized to the same clock as the animation being watched. As such, jitter or other perturbations can be seen.

As for high frame rates, GPUs (Graphic Processing Units, which is what an Acclerator Card has) are not the sole answer, and in fact is a kind of a cop-out by lazy/poor programmers. Atleast that's the way it was. Now, CPUs are affordable and really are a commodity now, so it's okay to require you have one.

Professional game developers (I used to be one) don't try to support the hottest, fastest GPU out there and nothing else. They try to support much lower standards as well as the higher standards so that market share is larger (and hence retail sales).

They do this by writing games very close to the hardware. By using code profilers and debuggers. By analyzing not only the code that the compilers generate, but also how data is organized. By talking with O/S makers and GPU makers, etc.

Remember, aside from the game control interface, a game is not much more than a very sophisticated database. The "engine" merely pulls data out of the data base and slams it on screen as fast as possible.

How data is organized is as important as how the engine is written.

Who the hell cares? After 26 FPS (I think is the number, but its near there if thats not it) the human eye ceases to notice the difference (conciously anyhow). [Most?] movies have 26 FPS. I dont get what all the hype about getting higher FPS is about. After a certain point it makes no difference.

Ummm...motion blur. In video games there is no motion blur.
http://amo.net/NT/02-21-01FPS.html

On movies and tv, it doesn't make a difference. But have you ever played a game with 26 fps? And then compare it to 100+ or even 200+ fps? Believe me, there is a HUGE difference because I play these types of games all the time. It makes the 26 fps look like a slideshow. Anyways if you don't believe me, you should try it out.

>> anyways, how the heck to they get frame rates so high?

Probably the work of nVidia.

More specific : GeForce 4 ti4600

I've never seen anything faster!

yeah, and watch those things BURN!
you tweak those things any further, they'll demand more from your system such as processor speed and, memory. don't forget that the card needs cooling when you do this.