What causes frame-rate-dependent bugs?

Logic that advances by a fixed amount per frame, or depends on a specific frame timing, behaves differently as frame rate changes — faster movement, missed collisions, or broken timing on other hardware.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Frame-Rate-Dependent Bugs

Quick answer: Express movement, timers, and rates in terms of elapsed time (delta), run physics on a fixed timestep, and avoid logic that assumes a particular frame rate.

A bug that appears at high or low frame rates is logic tied to frame count instead of time. Converting to time-based logic fixes it across all hardware. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Make logic time-based

Movement, cooldowns, and animations should advance by elapsed time (multiply by delta), not by a constant per frame. Frame-count logic runs faster or slower depending on the machine's frame rate.

2. Run physics on a fixed timestep

Step physics at a fixed rate independent of render frame rate, so collisions and forces behave the same whether the game renders at 30 or 144. Variable-rate physics produces frame-rate-dependent results.

3. Avoid frame-timing assumptions

Do not assume a specific frame rate for input windows, spawn timing, or sequencing. Test at very high and very low frame rates to flush out logic that only works at the rate you developed on.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every your game error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

The bug you can't reproduce isn't gone — it's just invisible until you capture it from the player's device.