According to John Carmack and I tend to agree with him.
Developers would much rather take the easy route when making a game and optimising a game engine beyond the bare minimum is a rarity these days.
Besides Turn 10 & ID Software, it’s really only Japanese devs who bother to implement this frame rate at all.
Come on! All games should be 60fps by now.
Nintendo’s been managing it (99% of the time) since the Gamecube days on hardware that’s woefully underpowered so there really isn’t any excuse.
If some companies can manage it, then any company not implementing an engine capable of 60 fps are either lazy or inept.
Here’s a handy little browser test tool that shows the difference between 30pfs and 60fps (along with lots of other frame rates via the drop down boxes)
Try it and have a play around with it. It might surprise you, especially if your one of the ones that doesn’t seem to be bothered/affected by the fps debate. There’s every chance that you might not notice any differences within the test but you won’t know unless you give it a go.
And yes, it was very hard figuring out what picture to use as a header to this post.
I do agree to a certain extent.
Although I’d like to see companies strive to reach the 60fps mark, there are exceptions when it comes to new software technologies being run on old hardware.
BF3 on a high-end PC will of course run at 60fps, probably even more. But on the 360 or the PS3 there’s a compromise there. In order to have 60fps on those consoles it would require other features taking a hit. Be it the graphics, the scale or the physics. Who knows?
I certainly don’t know the details of the development of the game, but a regular comment pumped out by Activision and Infinity Ward during the run-up to their games’ release, was that COD 3 would run at 60fps and that their nearest competitor (BF3) simply couldn’t.
I’m sure that if DICE and EA could have got the game running at 60fps they would have.
In the end, BF3 was released as a huge mess regardless—especially on the PS3—which should have taken another three months of development time, but even now with all the patches, 60fps is simply not possible on the consoles.
But hey, although I HATE EA, I really do love this game, it’s pretty much the only thing I’ve been playing recently and I can’t say that it’s bothered me that it’s not running at that magical frame-rate.
Gran Turismo is native 1080p AND 60fps.
A game running at a resolution of less than 720p (BF3) should be running at least 60fps. Anything less is lazyness or ineptness on the game engine’s part.
I’m not so sure.
I don’t claim to know the in’s and out’s of videogame construction, but I would er to the side of the developer in this argument.
BF3 has a lot more going on than Gran Turismo. A lot more variables involved that need calculating. A lot more visual effects (even if not in 1080p), a lot more physical calculations need to be made etc. etc.
In Bf3 you have large open environments, you have several different types of vehicles be it land based or air, machine or human. The game has a ton of different physics involved in the huge variety of weapons, and they have destructible environments thrown in for good measure.
COD was running at 60FPS, that game wasn’t 1080p, but then that game has smaller, fixed environments with no destruction.
I’m not saying it was impossible, hell, it might well have been possible given some extra time, but I’m not in the position to make that call.
This is a pretty ground-breaking, brand-new PC based engine porting the game over to old hardware. Shit, I bet a PC running with 512mb of ram wouldn’t even run the game, and yet we have both consoles doing just that with that amount of ram.
I don’t think it’s lazyness. I’m more inclined to believe that it was—in this case—a compromise.
Also, don’t forget John Carmack is speaking from a position of bias, just like the guys at Activision when they said the same thing.
Of course he’s going to sell the idea of 60fps, it’s his game design philosophy, and he want’s people to buy into that and appreciate his games more over others that don’t adhere to the same philosophy.
60fps is good, and a target that should be aimed for, but it’s not the be-all and end-all of videogames. If you want that to be the case, you should give up on consoles and move to the PC market, where your constant hardware upgrades can keep up ever growing power demands of evolving software.
There should have been a ‘with the’ in that last sentence.
You know what?
You speak a lot of sense and could be right about BF3.
For me, anything less than 60fps hurts my eye holes and it’s for this reason that I’d like everything to be in 60fps.
I’m not too fussed about 60fps, not least because I doubt it’ll become a standard for a while yet.
No matter what the game, dropping to 30 just gives so many more resources to play with, whether the dev is super adept or not.
There are certain games I wouldn’t like in 60fps, like Halo. But then there’s stuff like Sega Rally Revo which definitely should have been.
I think we’re at the mercy of television broadcasting tech – if this 48fps malarkey catches on, it could filter down to regular stuff which will cause 30fps to suddenly look bad.
What I can’t stand is current-gen games in 30fps without motion blur. Sega Rally on Saturn is absolutely fine for me in 30fps but I hate Revo running at the same
rate. I think it’s to do with the amount of info I’m processing in each frame. It’s the reason I didn’t buy that new Sonic Generations. Same with games like DIRT.
In fact, I think all racing games should be 60fps. Also, isn’t GT5 something like 1440×1080 stretched horizontally? It’s still good, and Polyphony use a lot of short cuts which I like(other devs will do things like modelling random trees in the distance for no in-game benefit whatsoever).