A developer tells this anecdote from a project from the PS2 era. They showed a pretty late build of the game to their publisher, very few weeks before the game had to be ready to begin the distribution process, and the FPS appeared at a corner of the screen, never quite falling below 30FPS, but often making important jumps. The people from the publishing company said that “Everything about the game looks fine, except for the FPS. 30 FPS is unacceptable, and we cannot publish it if you can’t reach a consistent 60 FPS”.
You don’t need to know much about development to understand that making such a demand weeks before the launch of a medium-sized project is asking the impossible, and so did this dev team. In the end, they changed the function that took the real calculation of the FPS so that it returned a fraction of the difference between 60 and the real FPS, so the next time the publisher took a look at the game, the FPS counter would always show a value between 58 and 60, even though they didn’t have the time to really optimize the game. The publisher didn’t notice the deception and the game was a commercial success.
Meh. 60 is enough for me. I didn’t notice 144 being that much better than 60.
30 can fuck right off though.
I can go down to 30 probably a bit lower as long as it is consistant, that is the most important part.
It can also have a bit to do with me powering through Watch Dogs at 1 fram per second in some parts. You never notice how good 25-30 is until your frames starts camping in the singel digits.
I remember playing Assassins Creed II on pc with a 9500GT and getting sub 20fps constantly to the point I had to wait for character animations to catch up with the dialogue so the next person could talk. Halfway through the game I upgraded to a GTX 560 and was astounded that everything was in sync and oh so smooth. I always remember that when I start getting annoyed I can’t get over 90fps in a game. As long as it’s playable!
It pretty much only makes a difference in FPS games where you’re constantly switching back and forth between crosshairs focus and peripheral vision flick reactions. At 144Hz, motion blur between frames is largely eliminated, so you have more accurate flicks and your vision at the crosshairs is much sharper.
All you FPS kids are just doing the new version of “eww that game has 2d graphics; polygons or bust!!” from the PlayStation era.
Yes, progress is cool and good, but no it’s not the end-all be-all and no not every game has to have bleeding edge FPS to be good.
Like, we’re literally already done this shit guys; can’t we just learn from the past?
My brother or sister in pixels, this is not the same. I’m not a graphics snob. I still play pixelated, barely discernible nonsense games. When I updated from 30 to 144, it was a whole new world. Now even 60 can feel sluggish. This is not a graphical fidelity argument. It’s input and response time and motion perception. Open your mind, man. Accept the frames.
And that matters for certain games, a lot. But it doesn’t functionally matter at all for others. Same as the transition to polygons. My point, which I thought I stated clearly, was not “FPS BAD!!”, it was “FPS generally good, but stop acting like it’s the single most important factor in modern gaming.”
Simply put, if everything was 144fps then it would be easier on the eyes and motions would feel more natural. Even if it’s just navigating menus in a pixel style game.
Real life has infinite frames per second. In a world where high fps gaming becomes the norm, a low 24 fps game could be a great art style and win awards for its ‘bold art direction’.
Yeah, as much as I can give a shit about ray tracing or better shadows or whatever, as a budget gamer, frame rate is really fucking me up. I have a very low end PC so 60 is basically max. Moving back to 30 on the PS4 honestly feels like I’m playing PS2. I had the [mis]fortune of hanging out at a friends house and playing his PC rig with a 40 series card, 240hz monitor, etc, and suffice it to say it took a few days before I could get back to playing on my shit without everything feeling broken.
Now even 60 can feel sluggish.
That’s more or less the placebo effect at work, though. Most people cannot see “faster” than 60FPS; the only actual upside of running higher FPS rate is that you don’t go below 60 in case the game starts to lag for whatever reason. Now, you may be one of the few who actually see perceive changes better than normal, but for the vast majority, it’s more or less just placebo.
One of most insufferable aspects of video game culture (pc gaming in particular) other than the relentless toxic masculinity from insecure nerds is an obsessive focus on having powerful hardware and shitting on people who think they are getting a good experience when they don’t have good hardware.
The point is to own a computer that other people don’t have so you can play a game and get an experience other people don’t have, the point isn’t to celebrate a diversity of gaming experiences and value accessibility for those without the money for a nice computer. It really doesn’t matter if these people are intending to do this consciously or not, this is a story as old as time. It is the same exact bullshit as guitar people who only think special exotic or vintage guitars are beautiful, claim to absolutely love guitar but never once in their life have stopped to think about how much more beautiful it is that any random chump can get an objectively wonderful sounding guitar for a couple of hundred dollars than it is that they own some stupid special edition guitar with a magic paint job that cost as much as my shitty car.
Good thing these people don’t fully dictate the flow of all of video game development, but they will never ever learn because this is the kind of pattern that arises not from conscious intention but rather from people uninterested in critically examining their own motivations.
It is the same damn nauseating thing with photography too….
it depends on if its a good 30 or not. if inputs are quick and responsive, and the framerate stays at 30 then its fine. but if my device is struggling to run the game and its stuttering and unresponsive then its awful
sm64 comes to mind as the best 30fps experience ive had, and i am spoiled rotten on high refresh rate games
I get it’s a meme but I usually play on 144fps and when I go back to 60 fps I literally don’t notice a difference even down to like 40-45 I barely see much difference. 30 is noticeable and a bit shit, but my eyes get used to it after like 30 mins, so not a big deal.
I think it takes significantly more mental extrapolation between frames and general adjustment to your eyes not receiving frames at as quick of a rate but if the frame rate is fairly stable the human brain adapts.
The brains visual processing is so powerful that the difference between 30fps and 144fps on paper is much smaller in reality, especially if your brain has already learned the muscle memory of “upscaling” a low framerate to work with its perception of a 3D environment.
Competitively, for games like arena shooters or rocket league the frame rate is real but for most games it is a matter of the smoothness occurring on the physical monitor screen or it occurring on some level of mental image processing. What someone sees who has let the mental skill of processing a lower frame rate atrophy is a temporary sensation like putting on colored glasses for awhile, then taking them off and seeing everything washed out in a particular color. Weird, uncomfortable, but temporary.
The real problem is inconsistent framerate where the clock your brain has gotten used to receiving new visual information with the arrival of each new frame of visual information is slow enough to be on the edge of perception but keeps speeding up or slowing down chaotically. Your brain can’t just train a static layer of mental image processing to smoothen that out. Time almost feels like it is slowing up and speeding down a little, and it becomes emotionally discouraging that every time something fun happens the framerate dips and reality becomes choppier.
Yeah no, a game I regularly play just had 120Hz support added, and I’m never changing that back. I once even tried editing the .ini config just to change the framerate after coming back to it from a 120Hz game. It just is night and day, both in the input lag and the smoothness of the image
My monitor is 240hz and counter strike runs about 400fps max settings at 1080p on my new system. It was absolutely insane playing for the first time coming from my steam deck running 30-40fps on lowest settings.
