If they said "The game is locked to 30fps" I'd probably have been ok with that. It's not a fast paced game, and capping the framerate at a low value is probably a decent enough design choice for that particular game. As you say, it's enough that you won't really notice it in gameplay.
The problem is that we're talking about the absolute highest end consumer card sold by nVidia rendering a blank map, without such a framerate lock in place. If it's not locked, then that framerate is the product of a performance bottleneck somewhere. With a modern gaming PC, "performance bottleneck" also means you're sitting next to a moderately powerful space heater.
Locking a game to 30hz would not have been a "decent design choice" given that's half the refresh rate of nearly every computer monitor out there, especially for a game that involves a lot of scrolling.
Games get mocked for locking to 60hz, 30hz would get them laughed at outright.
Yes, but this is an unrelated issue. Last game I have seen to not have an "hardware cursor" option/default was a badly made DirectX 8 one that has trouble running on Windows 7.
>In my experience 30 FPS is perfectly fine for a game like this, I'm not sure what do you mean about "scrolling" ?
A top down city sim 'scrolls' up/down/left/right around a map, which is a movement that is strongly associated to screen tearing -- which i'm not really sure is a relevant thing to bring up given the variety of v-sync options available.
Even a game locked at 30fps that 'scrolls' often shouldn't experience significant tearing with the options out there.
Even without tearing, a high framerate is very desirable for scrolling around a map or web page. For instance, iphones are widely praised for excelling in this regard. It's just easier on the eyes if things on screen move smoothly when you scroll/pan around, it's less fatiguing.
The problem is that we're talking about the absolute highest end consumer card sold by nVidia rendering a blank map, without such a framerate lock in place. If it's not locked, then that framerate is the product of a performance bottleneck somewhere. With a modern gaming PC, "performance bottleneck" also means you're sitting next to a moderately powerful space heater.