Capcom Explains Why 30 FPS Isn't That Bad

[vasiD]

I don't believe the bit he said about the 60fps. Maybe I'm just a freak who doesn't notice due to years spent gaming for hours on end, but I've played countless games for absurd periods of time on my PC at 60fps and the picture never seems to blink and my eyes don't seem to get irritated (unless I'm absurdly high).

So I call bullshit.

That said, I haven't played more than a few hours of any DMC, and don't really intend to start now so this really has nothing to do with me aside from me being a former Capcom fan who now feels like a victim of their endless franchise abuse... So I guess I'm sympathetically bitching and pointing out flaws for my fellow former Cap-Commies.

 

[The Wooster]

Personally I don't think this is that bad. Yes, it would be better if it runs at 60, but in order to manage that they would have to cut corners. Another thing is that a game set to run on high fps on a console sometimes got the problem of drops in fps. Some of us find the difference between 30 and 60 to be subtle, but I think we all agree that a sudden drop from 60 to 40 in the middle of an intense fast paced section is quite jarring.

I'd rather have a stable low fps than a bouncy one.

Here's the thing though; they're not lowering the framerate so they have an overhead, they're lowering it to squeeze in fancier effects and terrain shifting, so that doesn't necessarily mean the game will have a stable framerate. What it does mean is that if it does drop during busy periods, you're going from 30 to 20.

 

[Truehare]

Crapcom, telling us to use our imagination to fill in the blanks is something that passed back during the Atari age, but now, no, go fuck yourselves.

That kind of thinking right there is one of the main reasons I miss the Atari days...

OT, since I'm a PC player (and the only DMC I played was 4, which was a usual Capcom port, i.e., a piece of garbage on PC), I don't care that much, I won't play the game anyway. But 30 fps is usually alright by me, my brain is quite able to fill in the gaps, and my eyes can't go that fast anyway... I'd rather save them the extra effort anyday!

 

[Sean951]

... I spent years playing WoW at 16-24 FPS and thought it looked pretty good. The idea of a game running at 60 always baffled me.

 

[Yopaz]

Personally I don't think this is that bad. Yes, it would be better if it runs at 60, but in order to manage that they would have to cut corners. Another thing is that a game set to run on high fps on a console sometimes got the problem of drops in fps. Some of us find the difference between 30 and 60 to be subtle, but I think we all agree that a sudden drop from 60 to 40 in the middle of an intense fast paced section is quite jarring.

I'd rather have a stable low fps than a bouncy one.

Here's the thing though; they're not lowering the framerate so they have an overhead, they're lowering it to squeeze in fancier effects and terrain shifting, so that doesn't necessarily mean the game will have a stable framerate. What it does mean is that if it does drop during busy periods, you're going from 30 to 20.

Sure, but trying to make the game run with 60 fps would pretty much make it certain that the game would have unstable framerate. However this is the reason I can't wait to see the end of this generation and see new systems being released that should be able to deliver 60 fps even in titles like this.

 

[Infernai]

Puts a picture of new Vergil on the newsfeed thumbnail...



60 FPS is great, but it's not the be all end all of games.

I'd prefer it if it were 60, but my day won't be ruined if it's not.

It's ok man, it's ok...take a look at this, block your ears and just pretend there is no new Devil May Cry aside from the HD collection.

 

[EternalFacepalm]

60 FPS is a speed the brain and the eye can catch up with and understand," he said. "But at 30 FPS there's a technique where you take advantage of the brain's ability to fill in the blanks. So even though you have it running at 30 FPS, you create the motions and the poses in such a way that the brain will naturally fill in what would have been the extra frames.

HAH

Well, that doesn't make sense at all. If that's an honest excuse, they're, to put it bluntly, idiots. I really see no reason to literally cap it. If they can cap it at 30, they can cap it at 60. At least, they should be able to if they know what they're doing.

Personally I know squat about how many framerates the human eye can perceive but I do know that people don't go out of movie-theaters complaining about choppy framerates (movies usually run 24fps).

Watching a movie is a passive activity. Playing a video game is not. They also apply motion blur to movies (although the same could be done here, I guess), however that becomes a different thing entirely when playing a game. Especially in multiplayer games, the fact that you need at least 60 FPS for it to be fair is easily evident.

 

[vezon]

My head just exploded. Again. 30fps in games its far worse than 60. Period. 30 fps its the lower decent limit of playing. And btw in shooters u welcome if u have 100fps.
DON'T CONFUSE GAMING FPS AND MOVIE FPS PEOPLE. ITS NOT THE SAME THING

 

[GamingAwesome1]

"Let me feed a wide variety of total bullshit to explain why we suck at making games and can't get our games to run at what should be the bloody standard." - Capcom

I'm having none of this. 30FPS is just worse, period. Stop making excuses and actually make your game run properly.

 

[Kargathia]

Well OK.

Personally I know squat about how many framerates the human eye can perceive but I do know that people don't go out of movie-theaters complaining about choppy framerates (movies usually run 24fps).

Movie-goers are used to choppy frame-rates, and certainly can see the difference - higher frame rates are associated with consumer hand-held cams, and will elicit a very mixed response whenever taken to the big screen. The Hobbit is doing it right now.

But beyond that the comparison wasn't entirely valid in the first place, as there is a large difference between movies and gaming: interactivity. In a game you won't only see how choppy the image is, but you'll also see the response time to your actions, which is inherently worse in 30FPS. It also takes away the contribution of the Director of Photography, who will have worked around the limitations of 24fps, and avoided things like fast panning.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

The PC port? I wasn't aware they announced it for PC.

Anyway, a 30fps capped hack&slash? Good luck with that.

And please don't compare gaming fps with movie fps. It just makes you look like an ignoramus.

 

[5ilver]

To all those saying there is no difference between 30 and 60, go play a game at 30 for an hour, switch to 60 and play another hour, switch back to 30.
Personally, I would be very surprised and a little disappointed if even a single person was ok with 30 after having experienced 60.

 

[grammarye]

My god. I would honestly expect a game developer, with people who actually do develop 3D graphics, cameras, and so on, to know why 30 FPS isn't actually that good. I'm not that surprised that we're having a lovely rehash of the same tired arguments of such rubbish as 'it must be fine, movies are at 24 FPS' as though they are even related. People just refuse to learn the science behind actual projection.

For starters, movies are showing actual real action complete with blur that is a natural phenomenon of filming. They are not trying to simulate it with a bunch of static polygons. That actor running across the screen is actually running and the camera is capturing enough frames of that to convince an onlooker. That is a huge difference vs trying to portray a 3D mesh seamlessly moving from A to B when in truth it's a static object photographed many times. Why the heck do you think we got the option in so many recent games to add motion blur? It's like go-faster stripes on a car. They really do work, as they fool the eye. It also ignores that you in a game can pan the view wherever you like (unless you're playing a game that is in fact a movie) whereas the editor of the movie can discard shots that don't look good.

People seem to forget that a huge amount of effort & trickery goes into making a believable 3D scene that renders in real time and yet portrays something effectively. FPS is a significant part of that.

As for the eyes themselves - various studies have shown that as with any bell curve, some eyes can delineate up to 300 FPS, but it's not the FPS itself that makes the difference. It's whether the eye is convincingly fooled that motion is occurring instead of a sequence of static frames. That is up to your eyes and your eyes alone. 30 FPS is pretty low as a starting point to work with for the likely target audience even on a TV, so let's hope that all those tricks they intend work.

However, the key line is 'The PC port will apparently run at a solid 60FPS, making it the version of choice depending on release date and port quality'. So in other words, they can't make it run well on consoles.

Edit: Damn it, th155 entirely summarised this better than I did

 

[teebeeohh]

The best thing about this is the knee jerk reaction of "pc gamers elitism complain" right from the get go. Seriously, who was knee jerk reactions here?

 

[Vivi22]

Meanwhile Nvidia and Amd set out to kill these guys, because no one has a reason to buy their top end GPUs anymore.

Sure, if he weren't lying through his teeth I'd imagine Nvidia and AMD might be quite upset.

 

[hermes]

I don't mind if its 30 or 60 FPS as long as its constant. A smooth 30 feels a lot better than something that, sometimes, reaches 60...

 

[Scow2]

I can see the difference between 30 and 60 FPS on an uncapped machine... but that's because the 30 FPS is actually much lower, being displayed as 30 because of the previous higher values. However... a consistent 30 FPS? That's as good as 60 as far as I can tell.

Of course, I couldn't tell the difference in the animation in the comparison bouncing boxes.

 

[Meatspinner]

30 isn't bad, it's just that some ALL PC gamers get a kneejerk reaction to not being able to play games in 60. It's some sort of elitism factor here.

My personal thoughts? It's elitism as usual and the FPS on my TV won't appear to make a difference but my computer monitor will. I don't care a single bit as long as the game is fun.

Dafuq?

Have you how some PS3 players react when their framerate drops to 58?

OT: Meh... past 30 is not that big of a difference. Always felt it has more to do with mastubatory numbers then actuall performance

 

[AJax_21]

Again: Am I REALLY the ONLY person left alive that DOES NOT GIVE A SHIT about something being at 30 FPS?

You're not the only one. I imagine most people who share the feeling don't feel the need to speak up because they'll get smothered by the resolution and power of someones throbbing PC.

You know, this has nothing to do with PC elitism, right?

Bayonetta already came out and managed to create a hack-and-slash game that not only looked great, but ran at 60fps. All the DMC games released on consoles prior to this one ran at 60fps. God Of War bloody 3 ran at 60fps, and that game had to handle bosses a mile high! Ninja Gaiden Black ran at 60fps!

When it comes to hack-and-slash games, 60fps is the industry standard. You can get away with lower if your combat engine is a bit slower-paced (Otogi, Dark Souls), but for a series which revolves around split second timing and hair-trigger reactions, 60 frames per second is the standard. And given that Bayonetta and God Of War 3 have already proven that it's possible to make visually stunning hack-and-slash games with high frame rates, there is no reason Capcom and Ninja Theory couldn't have done the same.

Except that they decided to use an engine that isn't designed for hack-and-slash games, and is already on its last legs this generation anyway.

That's the issue.

Stop it. Stop making sense.

 

[DoPo]

Am I the ONLY one in this thread that DOES NOT MIND playing at 30 FPS?

Again: Am I REALLY the ONLY person left alive that DOES NOT GIVE A SHIT about something being at 30 FPS?

Well, let's put it this way: have you read the thread? I think that would answer your question.