Two settings that changed game speed while presenting as smoothness or tearing
controls are no longer offered.
Frame rate: 120 Hz and 144 Hz are gone
The row now offers 30 Hz and 60 Hz.
Ninja Gaiden II paces its own logic off the refresh rate it is told the display
has. Above 60 it does not render more smoothly, it runs faster — combat,
physics and timers all speed up — and a player who selected 144 hit a crash. The
row previously carried a line saying "Above 60 the game runs faster, not
smoother", which was not enough: a menu is a promise that every option is a valid
choice, and a warning under a broken one does not make it one.
V-Sync is gone, for the same reason
Off raised the guest vblank from 60 Hz to 1000 Hz, and this title advances its
logic on vblank — so it was a game-speed control wearing the name of a tearing
control. Anyone turning it off for input latency, as they reasonably might on any
other game, got a game running many times too fast.
Your existing settings still load
Both fields still parse, so an existing ng2_settings.cfg opens as before. A file
holding fps=144 or vsync=0 is simply brought back to 60 Hz and V-Sync on. The
safe value is forced in the settings clamp and in the tuning that reaches the GPU
plugin, not just hidden in the menu, so a hand-edited file cannot reintroduce the
speed-up either.
Not shipping: frame interpolation
An attempt to give the smoothness those options implied without the speed-up —
synthesizing an in-between frame so the display could run at 120 while the
simulation stayed at 60. It worked, and was measured working in gameplay at an
evenly-paced 120 fps with the simulation still at 60. It is not here because it
hung the game on roughly 60% of heavy scene loads, for a structural reason rather
than a fixable bug. The full reasoning and measurements are kept for anyone who
revisits it.