I was just wondering if it is possible for a game to have a limit on the FPS you can achieve in game?

The reason I ask is I recently built my first comp. After a little overclocking I managed to get the 5th highest score for comparible rigs on
3DMARK06 a little over 5000.

The only game I play at the moment is SWG. The max FPS i can get in this game seems to be 30.

Any insight would be helpful.
Thank you in advance

By the way my comp specs are in my profile. I have an emachine that runs the game at the same FPS as my comp.

You perhaps cannot expect more with the budget & home eMachine due to motherboard limits and power supply limits.

Sounds like you have V-Sync enabled for a Direct3D game. D3D doesn't support triple buffering, so if your refresh rate is 60Hz (most LCDs) and you can't maintain a minimum of 60FPS then your framerate will be cut in half - i.e. your max FPS will be 30.

So, you can either disable V-Sync, or if you don't like the tearing you can download RivaTuner, which comes with a program called D3DOverrider which enables triple buffering for D3D games.

hmm I will try that tonight. Need to do my research on Riva Tuner. Thanks for the info.

I didn't understand that
I normally have V-Sync enabled, and BF2 for example never runs at a constant 60 FPS. It hovers around 40-60 FPS. And my refresh rate is always set to 60 Hz (LCD monitor)...

The why it never runs at 30 FPS?

It depends on the game.

Many 3D engines used in games have support for maximum rendered frames per second.

I keep vsync enabled, and limit games to 25 - 60 fps if possible (depending on the game genre).