What causes a web game running too fast on a 144 Hz monitor?

Movement is applied per requestAnimationFrame tick assuming 60 calls per second, but on a 144 Hz display the callback fires far more often, so everything moves proportionally faster.

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 a Web Game Running Too Fast on a 144 Hz Monitor

Quick answer: Multiply movement by the measured delta time between frames instead of a fixed per-frame amount, so speed stays constant regardless of refresh rate.

Your platformer is perfect on a 60 Hz laptop and runs at warp speed on a 144 Hz gaming monitor. The loop assumes a fixed 60 frames per second, but rAF matches the display. Switch to delta-time movement to decouple speed from refresh.

How to fix it

1. Use delta time

Compute the elapsed time from the timestamp rAF passes your callback and multiply velocities by it, e.g. x += speed * dt, so distance per second is constant at any refresh rate.

2. Clamp the delta

Cap dt to avoid a huge jump after a tab is backgrounded and refocused, which would otherwise teleport objects on the first frame back.

3. Use a fixed step for physics

For collision-sensitive logic, accumulate delta time and run physics in fixed-size steps so behavior is deterministic even as frame rate varies.

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 HTML5 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 errors you never hear about are the ones quietly costing you players. Visibility turns them into a worklist.