I allways was bothered by my zune’s laggyness, but attributed this to the fact that my zune has a full 80 gigs of content on it and/or that i dropped it or screwed up a sync or something. I picked up my grandfather’s old zune 30 the other day and was shocked when it ran so smoothly that I assumed there must have been some firmware update with fancy new animations. (bzzzzzzzzt wrong, the new zunes all are just slow as !#$%)

Michael, don’t you mean "… we only call draw on the …"?

If not, I mean, if you were meaning "update" in fact, how can then this affect responsiveness to user input on Zune 2 devices?

Learn where to cut back, Microsoft. Device performance should have been your last choice.

I assume the last sentence is a generalization but this irks me nevertheless. The difference might not be that perceptible for many users or most users but for some it is considerable.

A year ago I was showing NBA 2K7 on the 360 to my sister in order to show her how human characters look in modern games and she asked me why ‘the movement sometimes is so jerky’. NBA 2K7 runs with 60fps (frames per second) in-game and 30fps (sometimes less) in replays and close-ups.

I was surprised because she is not that much of a gamer. The last time she played regularly was in the Super Nintendo Mega Drive days. Then again that might be the reason she noticed because back then pretty much every game ran with 60fps. They did that for a good reason.

Additionally in 2D games movement is almost never into the depth of the screen, it is always sideways, game objects travel the most distance per frame on the screen plane and low framerates become most noticeable.

I don’t know of any developers who think that anything less than 30 FPS is acceptable. Everybody is aiming for at least 30. But somehow ‘acceptable’ has become the new ‘good’ over the years because even AAA titles are aiming for it and now devices don’t allow anything above it.