Frame

A frame is the primary unit of time in a Pikmin game's logic routine. Every frame, the game's world is updated, and the screen is redrawn to reflect the current state of the game. Frames "tick" at a regular interval, in order to provide a seamless stream of images that form the game's video. Processing cannot happen between two frames, meaning that an object's state can only be updated once per frame. Hence, the interval between two frames needs to be low enough to provide a smooth transition between an object's states over time (such as the position in the world map of a moving object), but high enough that the console can keep up with the speed.

In tool-assisted superplays, some tricks or glitches need to be "frame-perfect", meaning there is a one-frame window in which an outcome can happen. This makes them quite hard or impossible to perform consistently in real time.

Framerate
The Pikmin games contain complex areas and several objects, more notably, the Pikmin themselves, with 100 of them being able to stay on-screen at once. In order for the console to process the world's logic and render all of its elements at a steady speed, it cannot render at a large framerate. ,, and run at 30 frames per second. The exception to this is the European version of Pikmin and Pikmin 2, due to the need of supporting the PAL 50 Hz frequency: the former supports 60hz only in the New Play Control version, and playing the game at 50 Hz makes the gameplay slower by approximately 16.7% in order to run at 25 frames per second. Pikmin 2 supports 60 Hz in both versions, though when set to 50 Hz, the game still runs at 25 frames per second. Gameplay is not slower during this operation in Pikmin 2. Other than that, the main menus of the first two games, and the options menu, high scores menu, bonuses menu, and area selection menu in Pikmin 2 all run at twice the framerate of the normal game.

Should the console have to process a large amount of instructions, it may fail to do all of them in a single frame, needing to extend the duration of the frame until everything is concluded. If this happens over a large amount of time, it can be noticed by the player. An example would be the landing sequence in Pikmin 3, which oftentimes slows down the cutscene visibly, but not in a way that negatively impacts gameplay.