Consequences of uncapping fps

[A Wise Wolf]

So I was looking to go for a second play-through, fully modded. (!st play-through was just FAR, 60fps) And was testing with uncapping the FPS to 120 using FAR. It's buttery smooth, and as far as I can tell, doesn't effect animations, enemies, combat, etc.

However, I know it's not recommended due to anything above 60fps "breaking progression", but what does it break exactly? Could I simply play at 120 and quickly cap it for certain sections?

[󠀡󠀡󠀡⁧⁧the.jester]

Various story sequences may not trigger, resulting in a soft-lock, or story sequences not starting at all (or even out of sequence). Some of the gameplay mechanics such as fishing (can break completely) and jumping (some jumps in the game become impossible) are affected.

If you have a save beforehand, you could cap it back to 60fps, reload and do that section I guess, but it could end up getting rather fiddly.

[TheSeek]

Just to be more specific, the issues can be both not triggering cutscenes, but also not triggering events, and nearly everything you interact with in the game is an event: cutscenes, key items spawning, NPC dialogues(both opening and closing them), quest starting or completing, items being removed from inventory when given to an NPC, etc.
This means that with fps above 60, anything could be a potential soft-lock: you might not be able to start a dialogue, or can start it, but when it's supposed to end it just won't end and you'll have the dialogue box still open, no one talking, and can't move at all or the camera remain still on the NPC, a cutscene at the end of a boss fight might not trigger meaning you defeat the boss but nothing happens and you're stuck with the boss(doing nothing) not able to progress. Or even a main quest where you have to deliver a key item to someone, you do so, the item is received, but the quest isn't registered as completed, so you can't progress at all. All of the above are issues that have been reported by multiple users, and every time they had the fps uncapped and were able to fix the issue by capping the fps to 60. But this does not mean "playing at above 60 > issue happens > quickly cap at 60 > issue solved", it means they had to cap the fps, and replay that boss/section/quest by reloading a previous save.
That said, these issues can not happen when playing above 60 if the framerate during the specific moments when any of those events trigger is perfectly constant. As example, if you're playing at 120fps and an event triggers while the fps are exacly at 120, cool, the event will trigger, but if the fps drop even just to 119 or 118 for a split second during the trigger, it might not trigger. IIRC(don't quote me on this though, not 100% sure) this is valid for all multiple of 15 above 60, so 75, 90, 105, 120, and so on(or multiple of 30? not sure, in case it'd be 90, 120, and so on).
So no, you can't keep it at 120 and quickly cap it at 60 during those sections, cause there's no way to predict when those sections will be, sometimes an event(and thus a trigger to make it happen) can happen even simply exiting a specific area during a specific point in the story, but you obviously can't know when that will happen, so if that even doesn't trigger when it should have you won't even be aware of it since it not triggering means you'll simply keep walking in the world, but the main story won't progress cause that event didn't happen.
So...to conclude, you can play at 120(or whatever other fps), there are quite a few people who do so and encounter no issue at all, but depending on how constant and "perfect" the framerate is(and in this game it can drop a few times regardless of your pc specs, it's due to limitations in the engine it was made in), some events might not trigger causing soft-locks and forcing you to quit the game and reload a last save(which in some story section, can be quite a lot before the issue might happen).

[Wehzy]

I can tell you what it means, i recently started this game for the first time and used FAR , had my FPS unlocked and HD textures installed. I had ZERO crashes and game run FLAWLESS until the end. I killed the last boss and nothing happend afterwards, i was literally softlocked and had to re-do the whole fight.

Now im on my third playthrough with locked FPS @60 cuz im afraid of getting a random crash again but its up to you.

Had the same issue with other console ported games like the evil within 1, i had to run away from that spiderthingy and it was getting me every time for 1 hour and i couldnt do anything. I capped my fps and cleared the lvl first try lol

[TheSeek]

Originally posted by ᴡ ᴇ ʜ ᴢ ʏ 'ꜰᴛᴘ:

Had the same issue with other console ported games like the evil within 1, i had to run away from that spiderthingy and it was getting me every time for 1 hour and i couldnt do anything. I capped my fps and cleared the lvl first try lol

This reminded me, another "issue" N:A has is the hacking speed is tied to the fps, meaning that it will go faster than intended when played above 60.fps, But, i know that some people who play above 60fps do not seem to have this issue, no idea how they do it.

[deidian]

Originally posted by TheSeek:

That said, these issues can not happen when playing above 60 if the framerate during the specific moments when any of those events trigger is perfectly constant. As example, if you're playing at 120fps and an event triggers while the fps are exacly at 120, cool, the event will trigger, but if the fps drop even just to 119 or 118 for a split second during the trigger, it might not trigger. IIRC(don't quote me on this though, not 100% sure) this is valid for all multiple of 15 above 60, so 75, 90, 105, 120, and so on(or multiple of 30? not sure, in case it'd be 90, 120, and so on).

Knowing exactly in which conditions and how they break would probably need to take a peek to the scripting used by the game engine and knowing exactly which timing mechanism it's using for arranging actions between scripting and internal engine actions.


Anyway the end result[in any game in the world] is basically scripts breaking, since script errors aren't usually allowed to crash the entire game, and stopping their execution with a part of the script never running.
Usually this leaves quests in half baked states and generally not intended states. Basically if hitting a certain stage required 10 automatic(non player) actions performed via a script maybe only 5, 6, or 7 are run, depending on where the script broke. From then on it's "lotery": the quest might be frozen forever in the current stage or you may be lucky and discover how to trigger again the event doing game actions or everything may keep going perfect except for the hidden fact of some corrupted data in the save file which never blows because it's never used again, but if it's used later problems might arise apparently related to nothing. But you never really know what you're up to because not knowing how the game works internally "bit by bit"

So practical advice: if it's known that running a game >60fps causes trouble with quests/scripting system just play it safe and stick to the supported fps.