[Update 2] How/why are console gamers satisfied with 30 fps?

[Baron Teapot]

Consoles are typically played on low-resolution televisions that are a few metres away. Especially on an old television, it's difficult to determine the jumping you get from 30FPS from that distance.

PC games are typically played on high-resolution monitors that are between one or two feet away. It is very easy to tell when a PC game is running at less-than 60FPS.

Our eyes can't detect greater than 60.

I think it's important, as even more than graphically, if you have 60 updates per-second, rather than 30 updates, you can perform twice as many physics calculations; it's more efficient and just generally better.

With a console, you didn't build the hardware. But with a PC, gamers tend to build their own - they chose the parts themselves, at least, which means they want the most possible performance from them. That's why people care about frames-per-second. It may not be important to you, but 60FPS is better than 30FPS, empirically.

The more frames, the smoother it looks (up to 60).

Plus, PC games have been running at 60FPS for decades. As PC gamers, we're quite used to it. You'd notice it too if suddenly your Xbox or Playstation only ran at 10FPS. "Why is the animation so jerky? Why is it stuttering?"

 

[Rozalia1]

....
They took John Carmack's engine...
John Carmack, the champion of low latency gameplay.
John fucking Carmack, the first real software engineer homegrown in the game industry.
JOHN, FUCKING CARMACK. HIS GAME ENGINE.
They took it, and decided to framelock at HALF the typical refresh rate?!

God. Fucking. Damnit.
Shinji Mikami, I understand you are an autour. I do not question your vision, but I question the _hell_ out of your tool choice. This is the engine that John Carmack painstakingly created to give a fluid 60fps experience on last generation hardware. If you're just going to half-ass it with all of the damn work done for you on hardware that is at least five times more powerful...

Look, I can maybe understand the argument that the lower framerate is cinematic. I can maybe understand that the 3rd person horror game isn't going to have the same design decisions as a FPS, but this 'feature parity' argument is some bull. Greater men than you have already done 60FPS fluid 1080p gameplay using the same damn engine on the same damn hardware.

You have no excuse other than lazyness. No excuse at all. You have probably one of the best engines available for making the most of limited hardware resources, a 30 FPS goal is just not even trying.

Taking it a bit far aren't you? You're talking as if its some grand show of disrespect, I assure you that neither Mikami or Carmack are going to concern themselves with such trifle.

What you're saying isn't unexpected but I have a question/s to that. I always hear people talk about (especially here) how the "make no compromise" artistic choice should be respected, yet the "parity" artistic choice is often maligned...why? Is it terribly wrong if he wants each consumer of his art to experience the same experience? Perhaps you think that lessens his art...how? Why? The man isn't an artist because he looks to churn out the top graphics possible, his appeal and his style is something beyond that.

 

[Irick]

....
They took John Carmack's engine...
John Carmack, the champion of low latency gameplay.
John fucking Carmack, the first real software engineer homegrown in the game industry.
JOHN, FUCKING CARMACK. HIS GAME ENGINE.
They took it, and decided to framelock at HALF the typical refresh rate?!

God. Fucking. Damnit.
Shinji Mikami, I understand you are an autour. I do not question your vision, but I question the _hell_ out of your tool choice. This is the engine that John Carmack painstakingly created to give a fluid 60fps experience on last generation hardware. If you're just going to half-ass it with all of the damn work done for you on hardware that is at least five times more powerful...

Look, I can maybe understand the argument that the lower framerate is cinematic. I can maybe understand that the 3rd person horror game isn't going to have the same design decisions as a FPS, but this 'feature parity' argument is some bull. Greater men than you have already done 60FPS fluid 1080p gameplay using the same damn engine on the same damn hardware.

You have no excuse other than lazyness. No excuse at all. You have probably one of the best engines available for making the most of limited hardware resources, a 30 FPS goal is just not even trying.

Taking it a bit far aren't you? You're talking as if its some grand show of disrespect, I assure you that neither Mikami or Carmack are going to concern themselves with such trifle.

What you're saying isn't unexpected but I have a question/s to that. I always hear people talk about (especially here) how the "make no compromise" artistic choice should be respected, yet the "parity" artistic choice is often maligned...why? Is it terribly wrong if he wants each consumer of his art to experience the same experience? Perhaps you think that lessens his art...how? Why? The man isn't an artist because he looks to churn out the top graphics possible, his appeal and his style is something beyond that.

Because they're not arguing this choice as a visionary choice. They're arguing it as an artificial limitation provided by the medium. As the medium (the engine) has priorly been used to provide a fluid experience in the same sorts of situation, this lazy difference _is_ insulting to the work that Carmack has done to optimize that engine. It _is_ insulting to see him flat out give up when he is given tools that someone spend decades refining to the express point to lower the difficulty in giving a fluid and uncompromised experience.

like i said, I can understand a cinematic argument. His fixed aspect ratio would even imply this is the case, but for them to come out, point to the consoles at the limiting factor and go "consoles suck, so we don't have to optimise for past 30FPS is dishonest, disingenuous, and not owning up to that fact is insulting to the hard work put into that game engine, not to mention the work put into the console design themselves.

This, as it has been communicated, is a lazy, not artistic choice. It is a choice to not do more work, despite how much has already been done for him.

So yeah. This isn't a rational reaction. This is me being very angry at someone throwing away decades worth of work because of their unwillingness to spend the time and effort to do it right.

 

[Souther Thorn]

Because it really doesn't matter that much to me.

 

[likalaruku]

I often play MMOs at 30fps on PC. I either don't notice any significant show-stopping lag, or I'm just used to it or willing to live with it for enjoying the graphics maxed out.

 

[Caiphus]

I think it's probably a mixture of:

1) Not knowing that there is a 30fps/60fps debate (although console gamers who visit gaming websites are probably aware there is a debate at least)

2) Not being able to tell the difference

3) Being used to 30fps

4) Not caring.

5) Emotional backlash against being told that their platform is inferior.

6) Emotional response to being told to care about something.

7) Belief that 30fps makes games more cinematic, or whatever.

And probably more. I certainly can tell the difference between 60 fps and 30fps when presented side by side, or immediately after one another. However, I couldn't tell you which of the ps3 games I've played recently have been 30fps. I'm sure some of them were, and I never noticed it.

That said, I'd rather framerates weren't locked on PC. That seems to ruin one of the points of having a PC in the first place. It also seems like it would be cheaper to aim for 60 fps on consoles (since it would mean you need to shove less graphics tech into your games). But I'm hardly an expert.

 

[ninja51]

They're satisfied because PC's capable of playing new games even close to 30 fps are expensive and out of range for alot of consumers. A cheaper dedicated machine that can for the most part reliably always give 30 fps is an enticing option. Developers have to cater to that machine so most optimize it pretty well getting good graphics absent the potential of crazy unique to pc display issues from a lack of catering to specific pc hardware on the developers part. Its pretty clear to me.

 

[Lord_Gremlin]

Back when I used to give a damn about PC I was all about best graphics. Even if that meant dipping below 30 FPS.
I honestly don't notice the difference if it doesn't dip below 30. What I can say is that cutscenes feel better at 30 FPS. Above that they get this strange feel to them... Hard to explain, play Yakuza Ishin on PS4, has gameplay at 60 FPS, cutscenes at 30 but some at 60. It's very easy to notice there.

 

[laggyteabag]

Update 2: Wow, what is going on? Now we've got Evil Within...
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/478493/the-evil-within-on-pc-is-locked-at-30fps/

Bethesda has confirmed that the PC version of The Evil Within will be locked at 30 frames per second.
According to the publisher, the PC version of the game will be identical to the console versions, and as such will feature the same frame rate.
Bethesda says this was due to the wishes of the game's director, Shinji Mikami, who wanted all versions to look and feel the same.

I really hope this isn't becoming a thing.

You can actually unlock it, but it is just locked by default. Not that it justifies it's existence though, because it is still a dreadful thing. I understand parity between consoles, because they are pretty much identical in terms of what they can output, but promoting parity between consoles and PC is just plain silly, especially when the bar is set so low. I personally play my games at 60FPS without fail, so to make me have to dig around in the files to make what I consider should be an industry standard available is a pretty stupid thing to do. That said, if the recommended specs are anything to go by, then I am unsure if a large amount of people will be able to play this game at 60FPS anyway.

 

[DoPo]

So even if the hardware is capable of 60fps, they will keep it locked to 30 to make it feel more "cinematic". But really it's because it seems most gamers are very happy with 30fps, which is disappointing as far as progress goes.

Progress implies that something is being improved upon. That isn't the case here, because as has been established the "improvement" 60fps is over 30fps is negligible at best, but more often unnoticeable.

[citation needed]

What I mean by that is that there is no reason to keep improving rendering quality to the point that you are rending something in a higher resolution than the human eye can see, at a higher frame rate than the brain can process.

So, on one hand, we have actual scientific evidence that you're wrong, on the other we have your word for it. It's hard but I think I won't take your word for it unless you provide a citation, as requested.

 

[SmugFrog]

you need to go to youtube, enable HTML5 play and then set playback speed at double to make this comparison doable, thus embeding it in flash form is completely pointless. youtube is a bad place for video comparisons anyway due to their compression. there are websites that support native 60fps videos, but the name slipepd my mind now sadly.

DOH! I just realized that a bit after posting it too. I figured it was buried far enough in the forum no one else would catch it, but yeah. My mistake! I saw the website on google search (can't remember the name right now) but I will check it out when I get home from work.

 

[Danny Dowling]

keep the frame rate down, keep the cost making the game down, keep the dev financially sound, dev keeps making games.

the rate video games have been going it's no secret it's becoming unsustainable.

so, keeping the framerate down somehow makes it cost less to develop? please explain what kind of logic you used to determine that.

your superior knowledge of this precedes me, enjoy your... erm... victory.

as i see it you have double the images to make, eh, bollocks to that sounds too much like hard work especially if the game is using hand drawn style artwork it'd take double time.

i don't really care too much about the ins and outs though so feel free not to correct me.

 

[Pseudonym]

I'd like to ask a question to those who know more of these fps things. In a multiplayer game my ping is almost always above 17 meaning it takes more than a 60th of a second between me pressing a button and the server knowing I did. Much of the time it is above 33 ping turning that to a 30th of a second. Does it then still matter whether the FPS is 60 or 30? If the server doesn't yet know that something happened 2 frames after it happened then for gameplay-purposes those frames can hardly have mattered, right? Or does it work in another way?

 

[DoPo]

So, on one hand, we have actual scientific evidence that you're wrong, on the other we have your word for it. It's hard but I think I won't take your word for it unless you provide a citation, as requested.

How about the pages and pages of people in this very thread saying they can't tell the difference?

Doesn't strike a scientific. More like anecdotal. Yes, some people may not be able to tell the difference, however, to take that as "The brain can't process it" is not only stupid, it's intellectually dishonest. Again, especially when you have actual scientific proof of the opposite.

 

[Morgoth780]

So, on one hand, we have actual scientific evidence that you're wrong, on the other we have your word for it. It's hard but I think I won't take your word for it unless you provide a citation, as requested.

How about the pages and pages of people in this very thread saying they can't tell the difference?

What about the many, many PC gamers who say there's a huge difference between 60 and 30?

 

[Danny Dowling]

So, on one hand, we have actual scientific evidence that you're wrong, on the other we have your word for it. It's hard but I think I won't take your word for it unless you provide a citation, as requested.

How about the pages and pages of people in this very thread saying they can't tell the difference?

What about the many, many PC gamers who say there's a huge difference between 60 and 30?

well then they're on PC aren't they.

the one that bugged me the most was a YT comment where someone said games in 30 fps just hurt their eyes now... wow, guess they've waited a long time to watch TV etc if it just hurt their eyes.

 

[EXos]

As I said in a previous post in this thread; you've trained yourself to see it. By default a person's senses aren't that...fine tuned. Not to lavish you with undo praise, but the comparison is somewhat like basing the average person's running speed solely on Olympic gold medalists. Simple fact is that there is a range for this, a certain tolerance for error. No two people are exactly alike, but there is a minimum and maximum sensitively, and those of us on the low end of the spectrum who haven't spent years obsessing over pixels are already reaching our limit. Yours is a bit higher, good for you, won't be too long before your limit is reached too. The actual average gamer is already about at their limit.

Here
http://amo.net/NT/02-21-01FPS.html
http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm
http://www.cameratechnica.com/2011/11/21/what-is-the-highest-frame-rate-the-human-eye-can-perceive/
Proof that you are wrong. It only took me a minute on google. ^^

In the last one it's even said that you'll notice FPS even more on a bigger screen.

24~30 are fine to make something look continuous and not like a slide slow but everything above 30 does add to the experience. Sure the Hobbit has been brought up several time but the main reason for that is because people are used to 24 for their movies.
For games more is better and PC gamers have been getting 60 Fps for years now and while this Console Gen should have been able to do 1080/60 they can barely do 1080/30 but I would bet that if there was a console gen that did run 60fps for the entire duration everybody would get pissed if they changed it back to 30.

Also, the hypocrisy of some as when the consoles were announced they sang praises for 60fps but now that it's not achievable it suddenly doesn't matter, just like resolution.

 

[Irick]

I'd like to ask a question to those who know more of these fps things. In a multiplayer game my ping is almost always above 17 meaning it takes more than a 60th of a second between me pressing a button and the server knowing I did. Much of the time it is above 33 ping turning that to a 30th of a second. Does it then still matter whether the FPS is 60 or 30? If the server doesn't yet know that something happened 2 frames after it happened then for gameplay-purposes those frames can hardly have mattered, right? Or does it work in another way?

Well sure!
So, when you are looking at a video game for things like timing in games there are a few concepts that you need to be aware of. First is the concept of ticks. In most video games, when things happen either on screen or off it is based on a tick rate. This is actually mostly true of most computer operations. Pretty much everything that happens in your computer happens at the beat of a clock. Now, in a game there can be several tick rates for different game elements. For instance, you can have a tick rate for pawn movement in multiplayer or a rick rate for physics engine updates. In the instance of multiplayer, the latency of your connection may make high tick rates more or less redundant, but on a LAN situation you'd want those high tick rates because of the low latency connection. However, no mater the speed of your connection the physics tick rate still needs to be up there. Even with only occasional updates the game engine can predict the motions of a pawn or physics object for a short time, but the ticks for the physics objects need to be consistent. This was actually a problem a while back with one of the big FPS titles: they basicly capped their physics tick at something like 10 FPS in multiplayer, which caused noticeable stuttering.

Now, another thing that can be based on ticks is animation. So, if you are running a physics simulation at ~30 FPS, have your pawn updating at ~15FPS and have your animation timed for 60FPS, you are for the most part going to feel as if you are playing a 60 FPS game even though some elements do not update their real values in that timeframe. Especially with games where you turn a lot, as the movement of the camera is always smooth. But even when games need to guess at data, such as likely player position between those updates, the intermediate data is still displayed.

This is of course, to say nothing of single player games, where you can have every timer just tick away in sync and get a blissfully consistent and smooth gameplay experience.

 

[DoPo]

Our eyes can't detect greater than 60.

Why in Hastur's name is this getting perpetuated? No, eyes DO NOT FUCKING SEE A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF FRAMES.

As a matter of fact, I had my first ever "greater than 60 FPS" experience ever, just two days ago. See, it's true you may need to adjust to a higher framerate, but when my housemate got a 144Hz monitor and showed it to me, it was immediately obvious. For reference, he showed me a fast dragging dragging of a bright window on a dark background - both on a 60 Hz and on the 144 Hz monitor, and the smoothness was immediately obvious. Anecdotal, but it's just another disproval of the ridiculous "eye framerate cap" bullshit. Can we please, for the love of the gods, stop with this?

 

[DoPo]

As I said in a previous post in this thread; you've trained yourself to see it. By default a person's senses aren't that...fine tuned. Not to lavish you with undo praise, but the comparison is somewhat like basing the average person's running speed solely on Olympic gold medalists. Simple fact is that there is a range for this, a certain tolerance for error. No two people are exactly alike, but there is a minimum and maximum sensitively, and those of us on the low end of the spectrum who haven't spent years obsessing over pixels are already reaching our limit. Yours is a bit higher, good for you, won't be too long before your limit is reached too. The actual average gamer is already about at their limit.

Here
http://amo.net/NT/02-21-01FPS.html
http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm
http://www.cameratechnica.com/2011/11/21/what-is-the-highest-frame-rate-the-human-eye-can-perceive/
Proof that you are wrong. It only took me a minute on google. ^^

In the last one it's even said that you'll notice FPS even more on a bigger screen.

24~30 are fine to make something look continuous and not like a slide slow but everything above 30 does add to the experience. Sure the Hobbit has been brought up several time but the main reason for that is because people are used to 24 for their movies.
For games more is better and PC gamers have been getting 60 Fps for years now and while this Console Gen should have been able to do 1080/60 they can barely do 1080/30 but I would bet that if there was a console gen that did run 60fps for the entire duration everybody would get pissed if they changed it back to 30.

Also, the hypocrisy of some as when the consoles were announced they sang praises for 60fps but now that it's not achievable it suddenly doesn't matter, just like resolution.

Again I think my Olympic running analogy is apt. Yes it is technically possibly for a person to move so fast, but few of us actually can. And nobody can without years of intense training. As I said I personally can't tell the difference, and there are many others in this boat as well, possibly even the majority. Likewise I can throw your "used to it" argument back at you, as you and others in your camp are simply "used to" looking for those differences that others would simply overlook. Again; you've trained yourself to see it. As for me I've been both a console and a PC gamer, I've played games 30, 60, 90, even at times as much as 120fps, and they add nothing to the experience. After 30 I simply can't see a difference.

I'm confused, are people able or not able to perceive more than 30 frames per second? Because so far you've said both and get all defensive and shit when called out. So would you mind sticking with one?