The frame rate acts as a governor. In the old days, games that were released on, say, the original IBM PC, were lucky to have any speed at all. Programmers just tried to make them as fast as possible. Then when faster machines were released, suddenly the old games were TOO fast, things sped by at an incredible rate. It occurred to people that maybe they should make a way of making sure they go up to a certain speed but not any faster. That's the desired frame rate.
You should find the frame rate that makes your game or program perfectly usable and leave it there. Personlly I usually use a frame rate of 4 or 6 fps, depending on the product, so it leaves me all sorts of CPU time. Cranking it up to 99 just tells Director to try to update the stage 99 times every second, which potentially means redrawing everything, or at least checking everything a LOT. And every time that Director is doing something is time that something else can't happen.
For instance, video (or file transfers or whatever). By having Director hog all the time trying to do 99 fps when it's not necessary, there's that much LESS time to process video, or transfer a file, or whatever. Your system might even perform WORSE because you're having Director do more refreshes than necessary.
Time is a finite resource. At any given moment, a CPU can only do one thing and one thing only. So it must divide up its time among all the processes running that need computing. If one of them, Director, is demanding a lot of time (to run 99 fps) then the CPU tries to give that time to Director, meaning everything else - including perhaps your video and/or your file transfer - has to make do with less.
So my general rule of thumb is to set the tempo to be JUST fast enough, but no faster.
- Tab
At 05:07 PM 4/10/04, Steve Rachels wrote:
> And no, before you ask, bumping up the frame rate does NOT make your > program run faster. In fact, quite the contrary.
Just out of curiosity, why would it run slower at a faster frame rate?
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