The game model might involve 20ms time slices. The frame rate is simply the best available visualisation of the "action" that the machine can manage.
So, you have your game model, input and output. Output needs to be good enough to convince you that you are in control and immersive enough to keep you engaged and input needs to be responsive enough to feel that you are in control. The model needs to keep track of and co-ordinate everything.
I'm old enough to still own a Commodore 64 and before that I played games and wrote some shit ones on ZX 80, 81 and Speccies. I typed in a lot of DATA statements back in the day (40 odd years ago)!
When you pare back a game to the bare basics - run it on a box with KB to deal with instead of GB - you quite quickly get to understand constraints.
Things are now way more complicated. You have to decide whether to use the CPU or the GPU for each task.
So, you have your game model, input and output. Output needs to be good enough to convince you that you are in control and immersive enough to keep you engaged and input needs to be responsive enough to feel that you are in control. The model needs to keep track of and co-ordinate everything.
I'm old enough to still own a Commodore 64 and before that I played games and wrote some shit ones on ZX 80, 81 and Speccies. I typed in a lot of DATA statements back in the day (40 odd years ago)!
When you pare back a game to the bare basics - run it on a box with KB to deal with instead of GB - you quite quickly get to understand constraints.
Things are now way more complicated. You have to decide whether to use the CPU or the GPU for each task.