Oh shoot
Over the last few months, a few dedicated fans have been researching how weapon recoil works in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. While this is typically done to evaluate which weapons are the best or how to better utilize them in certain situations, the results of this testing have turned up an interesting conclusion. Instead of some guns just being outright better than others, it turns out the framerate of PUBG directly affects the recoil of particular weapons.
A YouTuber by the name of WackyJacky101 has uploaded a short video that showcases how capping PUBG at 30 FPS will result in noticeably more controllable weapon recoil for certain firearms. While something like the AKM doesn’t have a dramatic change (it fires fairly slowly), the M249 becomes a monster at the lower refresh rate. In another surprising twist, limiting your framerate also lowers the rate-of-fire for some guns. While this makes fast firing weapons turn out to be less powerful, it does increase their overall accuracy and allow you to land more hits at greater distances.
Taking it a step further, Reddit user MutuTutu decided to try some arbitrary framerates to test WackyJacky101’s conclusion. It turns out the issue is a lot bigger than just “lower framerate = more accuracy.” If your framerate fluctuates a lot (as would be the case while playing without Vsync), the weapon recoil rates will be all over the scale.
Something like the AKM produces similar results at 30 and 60 FPS because its coded fire rate syncs up with those values. Playing the game at something like 31 FPS, though, will cause a much bigger change in that value. Using the formula that MutuTutu has come up with, you can determine the best possible framerate for each weapon based on its coded fire rate. There’s a big spreadsheet with the numbers for each weapon, if you’re curious.
Now, I’m not going to write all of this and pretend that the average player will notice these results. Many people just point and shoot and don’t worry too much about how the game calculates bullet travel. While that is perfectly fine, these results do show that a lot of the reason you might be losing is because the game has wildly different ballistics based on things out of your control.
PUBG has never been the most stable of games, but it has been out for more than a year as a “full release.” You would think issues with framerate wouldn’t still be cropping up, but even high-end machines still have issues running the game. Due to all of that, it seems that the average user without much knowledge of locking framerates or maximizing FPS will always be at a disadvantage now.
I don’t really know what else to say about this. I’ve always sort of felt like there was an issue with PUBG’s gunplay, but I never thought it was this serious. While I likely can’t hit anyone because I’m terrible at the game, maybe it is because of how shoddy the performance is. That seed of doubt has now been planted and I’ll never be able to accept my results as my own fault. That’s the real shame in this.
How LOW FPS will CHANGE how your weapons shoot – Important info – PUBG [WackyJacky101 via YouTube]
Actual reason behind WackyJacky’s newest find and how to increase DPS! [Reddit]
