Frames and development

[Andzon]

Hi there.

 

So for anyone that has a PS4 and have played Killzone SF or MGS5:GZ knows that these games look very good, are in 1080p as well as play at a fairly nice 60fps (To my knowledge). Now, with that, why are there games so much visually inferior that developers choose to make them 30fps? I just played Destiny (I know it's an Alpha but still) and it runs with, to me, a very unsmooth 30fps. It looks pretty poor, but I accept that as it's not the full game, but the low frames are just scary. I know it's an "open World", but hell, the mission areas don't seem all too large, and the loading times are hella long. This game is to be released in just a few months, and I highly doubt they are just gonna flip a switch and make it 60fps with enhanced Graphics. Another thing regarding this, as I have Heard a bit here and there, is that they degrade the ps4 version to be on par with the Xbone (not to disappoint the.. nvm), is this true?

 

Another question I have is why does some 30fps feel smooth and some 30fps just feel plain annoying? Take for example Killzone, put it down to 30fps and it feels very smooth, yum yum, but turn Watch Dogs down to 30fps(on PC) and it's like you can feel it stuttering; and no, not the driving kinda stuttering, I mean solid stuttering. Destiny on PS4 is Another example (I highly doubt it goes under 30fps), it just feels.. not smooth. Yes you might argue that due to having looked at the 60fps and go down to 30 will make it look bad at first, but even some games on the PS3 or on my old PC in 30 frames could also look smooth, whereas some not so much.

 

I'm not in this Tech business as much as some of you here so please forgive my poor knowledge.

[T.Vengeance]

I'm not sure how the game development pipeline is on console, but perhaps, frame time and vsync might make games feel less smooth. I know even on PC at 60FPS, when I turn on Vsync (sans triple buffering), there's a noticeable lag to my controls. And I remember awhile back, AMD had their fair share of issues with frame timing when you Xfire cards. Even with high FPS, the games still didn't feel smooth.

 

But suffice it to say, I can't say I agree with you with that 30fps smooth claim. Haven't owned a console at all, but all the 30fps titles that I play at Futureshop, Gamestop, Eb Games, etc, have all been pretty not smooth imo. 30FPS on PC is never smooth too.

[Nineshadow]

Bad programming...

[Andzon]

I removed v-sync and frame buffering on Watch Dogs, it still felt bad at 30fps.

 

@ DISCO BALL! - Now about it being poorly programmed, how come these top tier game developers aren't able to program their game properly? And how do you know they aren't?

[Rorgash]

In Watch dogs, the frame buffering cause massive lag, delays and stuttering and a feeling of being in soft cement, so if you still had that at 30 it probably got really bad as well.. and thats only if you also went into the ini files and removed mouse acceleration...

[Andzon]

I guess the smoothness feel is individual, just as some people feel difference between 60fps and 100/120fps while some don't.

[Rorgash]

I removed v-sync and frame buffering on Watch Dogs, it still felt bad at 30fps.

 

@ DISCO BALL! - Now about it being poorly programmed, how come these top tier game developers aren't able to program their game properly? And how do you know they aren't?

 

they are working on 3 year old hardware trying to make "next" gen games...  and when it comes to pc they are lazy as hell with the shitty ports

[Andzon]

But still, it's the beginning of the "next-gen" consoles and we're seeing upscaling and 30fps. It gives me a bad feeling. However some developers pull of Beautiful Graphics and frames. Is optimizing that hard even for these great developers? I mean did they even try W_D on PC Before they released it? It stutters on nearly every damn PC.

[Andzon]

It's like they said "fuck it, we can't delay it anymore, let's just push it out so everyone's happy, oh and just downscale the console versions and put 30fps and it'll be fiiine".

[T.Vengeance]

I removed v-sync and frame buffering on Watch Dogs, it still felt bad at 30fps.

 

@ DISCO BALL! - Now about it being poorly programmed, how come these top tier game developers aren't able to program their game properly? And how do you know they aren't?

Well I mean it's pretty subjective. I'm pretty sure some people (unlike me) have a higher tolerance for 30fps. There's definitely going to be diminishing returns on higher FPS in terms of smoothness, but that FPS number isn't 60, I can tell you that much. Hell, the 30fps "smoothness" argument can be translated to the 12fps min for human persistence vision arguement, but I don't see many argue that. It's way above the avg tolerance for lower FPS.

 

I think sometimes smoothness needs to take into account how fast you move the in game camera too. For a lot of console games, using the controller would mean a pretty low sensitivity. So everytime you turn, you have enough FPS (while running at 30fps) to have negligible differences in the image. But on PC (or high sensitivity gamers on consoles), when you can make a 180 degree turn in less than a quarter of a second, at 30fps, that means you'd get one frame every 24 degrees. At a field of view of 90, that's literally a quarter image change per frame. So yeah it'll feel much less smooth on 30fps.

[jmaster299]

Also keep in mind that the response time on a TV is crap. So no matter how well the game is developed, there is no overcoming the input lag you get from the slow response times on you TV.

[TheRetiredSlave]

One reason that some games running at 30 fps can feel smooth(ish) and other games at 30 fps feel horrible could be frame pacing.. AMD had the issue a while ago with multi-GPU setups not delivering frames at an even interval, which resulted in games feeling like they were stuttering even if they were running at a high framerate. Since console hardware is weak as it is, having some frames delivered early (~20ms) and some delivered late (~40ms) can make motion feel awkward. If a game were to deliver 30 FPS with an even 33ms between each frame, motion could feel smoother because the timing between frames is more consistent.