I don't get the justification for framerate cap in multiplayer

Forza Motorsport Forza Motorsport (2023) Discussion
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I’m a little unclear on why framerate is getting capped in multiplayer. So far I’ve heard two different explanations.

  1. There is an issue with timekeeping and framerate that could potentially cause race accuracy issues.

This is the more justifiable explanation, though it is deeply troubling that timing is tied to framerate if true.

  1. It’s to create competitive parity so people don’t feel pressured to spend more on hardware.

If this is the justification, it’s kind of twisted and hypocritical. I mean the game has wheel support, ultrawide support, and information output support, but suddenly a few extra frames are deemed an unfair advantage? That doesn’t line up.

Good equipment can help remove roadblocks to improvement, but at the end of the day they don’t make a good driver.

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Then surely the framera would be capped in career on PC as well?

Parity when cross platform, where console is being capped at 60, makes more sense than capping one part of PC gameplay but not another to stop people feeling they MUST buy new hardware.

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Perception is reality. Since many believe that high frame rate is an unfair advantage, then, locked FPS is the way to go.

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There’s been only 1 justification, being that it’s locked to ensure competitive parity in multiplayer.

All that’s happened since is people are doing the usual cynical/sceptical thing here and putting aside what the developer officially says so they can engage in wild speculation, hypothesising alternatives that fit with their ongoing narrative about the game going to be terrible.

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Mentioned this on GTP a few days ago:

My theory on the framerate thing is that their network sync rate is probably 60 times per second, so if people play on different framerates they could be sending different things to the server, thus introducing more lag and positional variation (a thing which does happen in Forza Horizon 5 ), leading to unnecessary and unusual car collisions.

It was a thing in F1 2021 , esports players brought it up a lot.

I think one reason some people appear upset is because the explanation Turn 10 gave was too vague and not really helpful. Yes it’s “to ensure there is a fair and level playing field”, cool (and I’m ok with it), but saying how would have avoided any controversy, I feel.

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Yeah that’s a lot more justified than the player parity explanation.

It just didn’t make sense. How can controller and wheel ever be considered competitive parity? Wheel is harder to learn but has higher potential, meanwhile controller gets hidden assists. How is higher framerate unfair but playing on an ultra wide is fine? Playing on an ultra wide+ is a definite advantage. I know this because I play on a superultrawide. I can play first person cockpit view and get all of its benefits with practically none of the drawbacks!

I don’t want them to take these features away, that would be horrible, it just seemed really disingenuous to claim that capping framerate was for competitive parity, while also touting features that decimate the concept of competitive parity far more than framerate does.

If it is a server sync thing, I’m far more understanding. I wish I could have the option to turn it off while PvPing with friends but I do get that does make the game worse for more serious clans with internal competitions.

I do always get a little suspicious about things being tied to framerate. I thought DX9 got rid of that. I however don’t know enough about programming to really claim that it’s a genuine red flag vs a false one.

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Oh come on KTR0N, without conversation on the upcoming title whether it be what you agree with or what you don’t you secretly love it and really enjoy adding fuel to the fire… how many days to go now?

Me, I think the answer from T10 to why MP is capped at 60 is absolutely hilarious and cannot wait until the game drops to be proven right!

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Of the points raised by @TheWarmWind…

  1. This is part of the issue I’ll add more info that I posted elsewhere below that can explain WHY this is the case. It’s still not REALLY justifiable but that’s just my opinion.

  2. I don’t think people will feel pressured to spend more on hardware just to play 1 single game. I certainly wouldn’t buy a console just to play say GT7, I didn’t in the past and wouldn’t do so now either, same was true of Forza prior to it’s arrival on PC, both games were interesting as I’m a petrolhead but still, I’m not gonna pay £500 to buy a console just to play a game that interests me, again that’s just me.
    On the flipside if you have a desktop for web browsing then for less than £200 you can get a GPU (e.g. a 2080Ti) that WILL get you 50-80fps @4K set to the extreme preset, which is 33% more than the XSX is capped at in performance mode. Cheaper than paying £500 for a console for a single game.

IDK the exact implimentation of FSR used on the XSX but IF it’s exactly the same as it is on PC this is what you’ll get.
Performance mode:
960 x 540 upscaled to 1920 x 1080
1280 x 720 upscaled to 2560 x 1440
1720 x 720 upscaled to 3440 x 1440
1920 x 1080 upscaled to 3840 x 2160

Quality mode:
1280 x 720 upscaled to 1920 x 1080
1706 x 960 upscaled to 2560 x 1440
2293 x 960 upscaled to 3440 x 1440
2560 x 1440 upscaled to 3840 x 2160

As for why MS T10 chose to limit fps rates, here’s my thoughts from another thread…

“60fps = 1 frame every 16.66666666666 recurring ms, but they cannot have infinite decimal places so you’ll get 16.67 or 16.667, a rounded up number.
With 144fps you you’re getting a frame every 6.94444444 recurring ms, again applying the same number of decimal places you’ll get 6.94 or 6.944ms, a rounded down number. Same with both 30 and 120fps which get also get rounded down.
So one gets rounded up, the other rounded down, there’s your synchronisation issue which eventually leads to the timing discrepancy, the longer the race the larger that discrepancy becomes.
Add in variable fps rates and you compound this problem further sometimes rouded up and sometimes rounded down…
The servers attempt to correct the discrepancy by miscalculating or adjusting the relative locations based on the servers polling rate.
The slower the polling rate is? The bigger the discrepancy.
The faster the polling rate is? The lower the discrepancy.
If the server polling rate is 60Hz then those at desynchronised fps rates will gain an advantage at each polling point as the server will round up or round down their ACTUAL position vs their perceived/expected position.
It can also lead to in race collisions (not outright smashes more likely bumping and grinding) due to these positional “disagreements”. in a similar way to high vs low ping to the servers due to internet connection speeds, exactly like when you see cars to appear to skip about rather than be smooth and consistent in their track placement.
MS could resolve this by increasing the polling rate the servers use but that increases costs, data throughput and power demand due to the increased calculations required (not massively but enough to cause this problem).
With the MP locked to 60fps everybody gets the same action rounded up instead of a mixture…”

An addition to these points…
You’ll notice that both 30fps and 120 fps both fall into the rounded down category but, afaik, no-one is complaining about 30fps having a potential advantage.
If I’m correct about the rounding issues then there’s likely an advantage for those playing at 30fps vs those playing at 60fps.
Not even a mention of this possibility thanks to T10 not ACTUALLY giving us details of the root cause of this issue.
Because T10 wants us to play on their servers instead of peer to peer like most other games they have to pay for those servers (if rented) or run and maintain them if they actually OWN the servers.
Higher fps rates means more data and more cost running the servers.

IIRC playing on dedicated servers gives them positional data on all players along with car used and tuning etc. All of this means T10 can monitor players and supposedly weed out those using cheats or trainers due to discrepancies which SHOULD be obvious when examined in detail.
Allowing them to ban persistent offenders and those abusing exploits as was seen in FH3 and FH4 with the Goliath team play bug.
Yet I’ve seen many vids that mention cheat times on the leaderboards??? How is this possible if T10 are checking for it happening? I have only one suggestion, they can’t afford to pay somone to trawl through all those datapoints stored on their servers, plus, who’d even WANT that job?
In all likelyhood they use some algorithm to scan for anomolies and act if that picks anything up.
What’s more interesting is something mentioned in this vid.

If a player has the skill to manually play the game but only has the skill to get say a top 15% time yet a dog with auto drive enabled can get a top 1%, doesn’t that make a mockery of ANY player actually TRYING to master the game?
Yeah I know these self drive features are intended to allow people with say “physical impairments” that prevent them from manually controlling the cars, to play and enjoy the game, problem is, people will often abuse things like this rather than TRY and improve their skills.

To me this seems like a far, FAR bigger issue than server desynchronisation giving PC players an advantage. They’re effectively ALLOWING players to use an IN BUILT cheat whilst claiming to abhor them and banning people for their use???

Seems like a huge dollop of double standards to me… Banning people for exploiting glitches yet allowing players an easy method to get top 1% times regardless of their skill set…

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The only valid point is to remove any advantage that can be had from higher framerates which is pretty much all input and display latency. basically by going from 60fps (16.67ms 0.01667 seconds) to 144fps (6.94ms 0.00694 seconds) you are basically improving your reaction time by 0.01 of a second

server tick rate and game timing are totally separate from the frame rate just like how the physics refresh rate is separate from the framerate. the only thing that is tied to the framerate is input and graphics render/display time.

personally I don’t agree with this design decision at all, especially because the vast majority of players who will benefit from the reduced latency of higher refresh rates will be playing on a wheel, which in Forza is known to be much more challenging to be at the top of the boards than it is on a controller anyway. Also, this is only for multiplayer, so leaderboards will still be able to be affected by this latency advantage.

Now if this were an esport event where parity is extremely crucial I’m all for it, but a blanket cap on all multiplayer doesn’t feel right to me

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this makes 0 sense, even if the game is rounding the timing based on the frame rate, at the second decimal place of a ms your at 0.00001 seconds, if memory serves forza only counts lap times to the thousandth of a second anyway

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It’s a perfeclty valid point, how do YOU explain such a discrepancy in timing?
Point is it doesn’t matter if it’s 1000th or 10000th of a second thats the rounding point, they WILL be rounded up or down creating a discrepancy either way.
In fact at 1,000th the problem is BIGGER than at 10,000th or even 1,000,000th.
So in effect you’ve pointed out precisiely how bad an issue this is.
Someone at 60fps gets rounded up someone at 30, 120 or 144fps gets rounded down meaning IF the timings are at 1000th of a second then every second they’d gain at LEAST 0.003s.
The maths:
60 seconds = 60,000ms, 60,000 / 17 = 3,529.411764705882 frames created per minute. 60,000 / 33 = 1,818.181818181818 frames created per minute.

30fps is exactly half of 60 fps but, if you divide 3,529.411764705882 by 2 you get 1,764.705882352941.

Here’s where it gets interesting… Divide 1,818.181818181818 by 1,764.705882352941 and you get 1.03030303030303 multiply this by 100 and you get 103.030303030303 a 3% difference between 30fps and 60fps over just 60 seconds, all due to rounding up and rounding down to the millisecond.

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But why is server update and tickrate tied to FPS at all?

I mean when I play Overwatch I don’t get more frames to shoot accurately with a higher framerate. That’s all tied to tickrate, which is completely independent of framerate.

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The current state of affairs with recent release of driving games is absolutely deplorable targeting high end expensive PC’s.
When you announced you were going to cap frame rates to 60 FPS I cancelled my per order. This morning I just got my refund from UBISOSFT (Motorfest) because I cancelled that order too because of locked 60fps. You claim your doing this to make things fair? Your turning high end PC’s into low end consoles. My argument is this is unfair because it alienates a specific group that being PC users. I will not support financially any developer who follows this absurd policy. I’m getting 189fps PINNED in FH5 and you want me to DUmB down to 60FPS? Starfield is capped at 30FPS but I did buy it because of DLSS and frame generation 120+fps. Have a nice day but it will without any money from me now or in the future.

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The problem for you is that you don’t get the advatage of the 120 hz over who plays 30 hz, that’s sportmanship man!

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I don’t get it too.
If first reason is true, just do all timing on server side and if client is too fast, ignore it and go with what server says. Second reason is nonsense, there are plenty of hardware additions that would help in race, not just a framerate.

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It’s even simpler than that…
T10 could simply do the right thing and fix the bug causing the issue…
Don’t hear of other racing games with this issue do you?
Why then does Forza?
Sheer lack of interest in resolving a fundamental flaw.
Opting to lose a large chunk of gamers MORE than willing to spend oodles of money on their hobby instead favouring bargain basement gamers who have yet to realise they were and are getting robbed and lied to about the capabilities of the hardware they’re being sold as a 4K console…
Oh it IS a 4K console just at varying low to mid level gfx settings, regularly dipping below 1600p resolution (or as low as 1440p or even 1080p) that gets upscaled to 4K
Same hardware as you’d find in even an entry level “gaming PC”…
Yet even such an entry level gaming PC could maintain a fixed gfx fidelity AND hit 60fps @ 4K native…
Why else are there console fools spouting tripe like “you need to spend $3000 to match the XSX performance!”
Really? Then MS would sell them for $3000 or more!
They like every other business only care about the contents of your wallett and how much they can get out of it for as little effort to them…
Which will cost MS T10 more?
Not fixing a bug thus securing the sales and pre orders from those who’ve cancelled pre-orders or refuse to buy “compromised quality games” those same PC owners of the 168 million gpus sold since XSX launched, the 55 million PC’s sold in Q1 of 2023 alone plus, potentially losing those customers for good? Or…
Pandering to the 21 million owners of their PRECIIIOOUUUS box of cheapness?
EA chose just as badly, refusing to listen to their fans, losing over 90% of players in BF2042, Paying 1.2 billion for codemashers a (company with equally horrific disdain for their fans) and as a result of their ignorance have been DESPERATELY trying to sell to Apple, Amazon, Comcast, Paramount, Disney etc…
They all said “Get tae …!”

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…This sounds like the rant of a person who took a loan out that they probably shouldn’t have. I don’t really know what else to say. Do you realize that Battlefield 2042 didn’t fail because they ignored PC players, it failed because they ignored all of the players and sent out a blatantly unfinished product? That game was equal-opportunity incomplete; it didn’t matter if you had a PC, Playstation, XBox, or membership to an internet cafe.

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Let’s not forget the fact that BF2042 got outcompeted and undercut by it’s own previous entries.

… and then Battlebit came along to really drive home everything wrong with the franchise. Drifting off topic a bit mentioning that though.

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I don’t think Xbox will beg you for not paying a month of Game Pass…

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You can race GT7 online even with VR. FM on the other hand is subject to T10’s frivolities.