Industry veteran claims it is 'pretty much guaranteed' developers will target the standard
Games developed for the next-generation of consoles will still target a performance of 30 frames per second, claims id Software co-founder John Carmack.
Taking to Twitter, the industry veteran said he could “pretty much guarantee” developers would target the standard, rather than aiming for anything as high as 60 fps.
ID Software games such as Rage and the Call of Duty series both hit up to 60 fps, but many titles in the current generation fall short such as the likes of Battlefield 3, which runs at 30 fps on consoles.
“Unfortunately, I can pretty much guarantee that a lot of next gen games will still target 30 fps,” said Carmack.
Targeting a typical frame rate of 30 frames per second could also mean many displays of future console games will also come in at a resolution of 720p.
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DICE rendering architect Johan Andersson last year defended the developer’s decision to run Battlefield 3 at 30 fps and 720p on the PS3 and Xbox 360, as the developer would not be able to create the game's “huge levels” if it aimed for 60 fps.
“We think huge levels, lots of players, great effects, destruction, vehicles and varied gameplay is more important than 1080p,” he said.
“We always do 30 frames per second on consoles, otherwise it wouldn’t be possible to fit in vehicles, effects, scale and all players.”
I'll be making all my games at 48 fps because the Hobbit.
And the PC's of today are *already* better than the next generation of consoles. 720p, haha
Meh, the one thing that next-gen could have done is get framerates back to where they should be after this 'juddery generation' put me right off console gaming.
Ok, maybe not everything needs to run at 60fps. But we shouldn't be having to play 30fps racing games now (as there's almost none left that run at 60), when back in the 90s we were playing Daytona, Sega Rally, and Ridge Racer at a glorious 60fps in the arcades.
Let's get this cleared up, it's not about the FPS. It's about that:
60fps -> 16.6ms per frame
30fps -> 33.3ms per frame
In other words, you get twice the amount of time to do everything that needs to be done in order to display the next frame. That helps, but, it's also a lie on many levels.
Expanding the time by a factor of 2x is about similar to making your code run 2x faster (it's not but bear with me). Programmers usually don't consider a speedup of 2x to be worth investigating. Why not? Because twice as fast does not mean twice as much stuff that can be done. For instance:
- Physics: twice as fast in an n-body simulation means that you can do 40% more bodies (not 100% more), n-body sims are O(n^2)
- 3D volumes of stuff: Games are not made in 1D, they're made in 3D. To sufficiently fill a world you need to extend "stuff" into 3 axes. So twice as fast lets you draw 25% more volume of stuff (extending stuff in 3D is O(n^3)).
There are many examples of this where twice as fast just does not give you enough "omph" to make it worth your while.
But 30FPS -> twice as much time is also a lie because there are things that you cannot run at these framerates, at all. For instance physics. Good physics does not run at 30FPS. You usually evaluate 90 to 180 physics steps per second (at a fixed timestep). Changing the display framerate won't change anything about that. So physics is out, no benefit there.
So what about speedups in raw rendering? Surely that is worth it? Well there are fixed cost things (like SSAO, shadowing etc.) and sure enough doing them at half the frame-rate frees up time for the rest. However, 30FPS also throws up a serious issue that adds cost back in. At 60-FPS you can get a decent display (albeit one that is too sharp) without artificial motion blurring. You can add motion blurring, but that's strictly speaking a "nice to have". But at 30FPS you *cannot* go without motion blurring. Why? Well movies, you see, they have motion blur "built-in". It's free. You know, shutter speed and all. But games don't have that. So if you present a 30FPS picture without motion blurring, things will just look "stuttery". So you've got to have pretty good motion blurring which is hellishly expensive to do.
Drivel, thank you for your comment, I found your explanation fascinating. I was also surprised, because I thought modern GPUs had some form of hardware support to accelerate motion blurring, given that it's used by developers more often these days; but I'm guessing the shaders are more generic (not fixed-function) and so it's an issue of where to apply their resources?
Who the hell would want to add motion blurring ASUS is just now developing monitors to eliminate it lol we don't want it we want it gone. You can have a good gaming experience without motion burr but it requires a 144hz monitor with 2ms Response time & ASUS new technology.
