60 fps (frames per second) in console games

[Ganelon]

It's not like sacrificing one aspect of a game for another is new. We had sound take a hit for polygons/FMVs to fit on CDs/carts in the 32-bit era. Nowadays, we're sacrificing power that could be used to enhance realistic lighting effects to more detailed polygon models instead. I'd prefer the smoothness of 60fps but I can sympathize with having better graphics.

A good example of a game that offered both ways was Toshinden 3. It had a 30fps mode with decent models and a 60fps mode with pretty much blocks for models. Let's just say that the latter mode wasn't popular enough to be used for the sequel.

[kozo]

I think back to Tobal 2 on the PS1. Not only was it 60 FPS, but it ran at the PS1's highest resolution (around VGA, I think) and had plenty of lighting effects. It still looks phenomenal, and I have no idea how they pulled it off considering how much I usually hate PS1 3D.

[undamned]

I still love me some Saturn Outrun in 60fps (code at the options screen)
-ud

[gs68]

I remember complaining that the Wii port of GHOST Squad was only 30FPS and people were like "NO ONE CARES, RAY!" and "I tried the arcade version and the Wii version and the Wii version runs smoother."

That latter statement made no fucking sense. Thankfully the porting team for The House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return got it right.

And also, SSB64. "Hey, a Nintendo 64 game that runs at 60FPS!"

Razing Storm runs on System 357 PS3 hardware in 30 FPS (and AFAIK it's in 720p), but I can live with this. I guess FPS differences are more obvious in racing games than gun games. That said, I wouldn't have minded a slight degrade in graphics detail to get RS up to 60 FPS.

RS I think is supposed to be 60FPS, as it's 60 at the most calm moments of the game, but any time at least 1 enemy is on-screen it takes a big framerate hit.

Same goes with The House of the Dead 4.

[null1024]

I like 60fps, most of the time, and quite frankly, it should be the norm, but sometimes, to make things look better, it should be cut [although, I'm impossibly glad on how they cut some [Okay, a LOT of] detail in F-Zero X to get 60FPS, because that is what really makes the game feel so damned fast]. I don't really hate 30fps, except in some situations, but it's passable.

Unless I'm playing Star Fox 2, anything below 30 on average is unacceptable. And I can barely tolerate that.


Also, on a side note, if I'm making a game, it runs at 45fps. This is a holdover from when I had a PIII 850 class machine, with an 8MB ATI Rage card, and when bilateral slowed down during early testing at 50 or 60fps. I liked the combination of cinematic-ness and smoothness it had, so it stayed. Also, 30fps was horridly slow and choppy there.

Also, on another side note, 60FPS on TV, like how soap operas are filmed, looks TERRIBLE to me. I dunno why.

[Ed Oscuro]

I liked the combination of cinematic-ness and smoothness [45 fps] had, so it stayed.

Eh, slow framerates are the least important part of making something look cinematic. It's all in frames blurring together. If you go down to 30 FPS or lower without blur, which your P850 wasn't using, it just looks like an old broke down horse of a game, that's all.

[EPS21]

Also, on another side note, 60FPS on TV, like how soap operas are filmed, looks TERRIBLE to me. I dunno why.

I never understood why they did that just for soaps. I think you answered your own question with that because as you said, lower framerates feel more cinematic, and what we're used to in nearly all TV shows and movies, so thus watching a soap seems very awkward.

[worstplayer]

In case of soap operas, the artificial feeling isn't because of 60fps, it's because they don't have budget for proper lighting. Completely static camera doesn't help either.
Just watch any soap on Youtube (limited to 30fps) and it doesn't look any better.

[D]

In case of soap operas, the artificial feeling isn't because of 60fps, it's because they don't have budget for proper lighting. Completely static camera doesn't help either.
Just watch any soap on Youtube (limited to 30fps) and it doesn't look any better.

That's what I suspect too. I don't get this cinematic feel at all. Except for proper lighting and softning filters. Funny how this thread turned into a soap knowledge debate.

[kengou]

The one example I always think of for a 30 fps game that actually feels good with that framerate is Shadow of the Colossus. It's probably lower than 30 at many parts, in fact, but I think it feels just perfect that way. It makes the game feel a lot more epic when a single colossus just walking around is enough to cause the framerate to drop. Thankfully the game isn't too fast and doesn't require twitchy controls. I honestly think if the game was a solid 60 fps it would lose some of its impact. It's possibly the only game I can say that about.

[TLB]

I had one friend who told me I was stupid for insisting on higher framerates in online FPS games like CS:S. I wanted to kill him. "THE HUMAN EYE CAN ONLY SEE XX FPS SO IT DOESN'T MATTER HURR"

[Ed Oscuro]

I had one friend who told me I was stupid for insisting on higher framerates in online FPS games like CS:S. I wanted to kill him. "THE HUMAN EYE CAN ONLY SEE XX FPS SO IT DOESN'T MATTER HURR"

Yeah we've all run into that stupidity. Challenge them to take the Half Life 1 Crowbar Challenge (TM)

[undamned]

In case of soap operas, the artificial feeling isn't because of 60fps, it's because they don't have budget for proper lighting. Completely static camera doesn't help either.
Just watch any soap on Youtube (limited to 30fps) and it doesn't look any better.

Framerate may not be the only problem w/ soaps, but I can tell you from first hand experience that framerate does give a totally different feel on 120hz TV's. I watched both Independence Day and some other war movie and it basically ruined the feel. Will Smith looked like he was on the set of some PBS show. It's hard to explain, but when you see it, you're like "what is this? Behind the scenes footage?"
-ud

[Dandy J]

Depends on the game. An rpg, or even some kind of medium-paced action game or something it can be 30fps. But gameplay-heavy games? Yea, it's a must. Competitive fps games (even higher than 60 here is usually sought), racing games, fighting games, shmups, etc. I still can't believe that every Need for Speed game runs around 30 fps (sometimes even lower!) on consoles. Inexcusable garbage.

[yyr]

It's good to know that someone besides me cares about this.

I won't play a racing game if it isn't 60fps. With the hardware as powerful as it is these days, there's no excuse for shipping anything with a lower framerate. I've heard people say that Ridge Racer 6 doesn't look that great...do they have eyes? Look at all of the subtle details in the environments...and the game never drops a frame. And this was in 2005.

I was also pissed about the Ghost Squad Wii port. You can't convince me that the Wii couldn't have handled a Chihiro game...the GameCube was about as powerful as the Xbox, right? The Wii is supposed to be more powerful, right? I don't remember exactly, but I think Sega had a third-party developer create the Wii port...if they'd done it themselves I bet it would have been 60.

It brought back bad memories of Time Crisis for PS1. Here we have a light-gun shooter where your one goal is to clear each stage as quickly as possible. Super System 22 ran it at 60fps, of course. PS1 version was sub-30 AND lower-resolution than the arcade. The game felt totally different, and it was impossible to get the same kind of clear times as you would in the arcade. My best on the cab is under 11 minutes, but no matter how hard I tried, I could never break 12 on the home version.

More frustrating to me is the fact that TC1 is one of my all-time favorites, and even after almost 15 years, there is still no perfect home version. I was hoping it would be an unlock in TC4 for PS3, but nope. I'm going to wind up buying the cab someday, I think.

[gs68]

Because no one cares about time-attacking TC anymore. =/ It's all about cranking out huge combos and drawing out the game a bit longer just to full-combo each section now.

[Lordstar]

whats a 60/30fps?
Oh dear lord im on a roll today

frames per second

I was joking. Jebus crimmeny

[Sandlegs]

i member when they remixed the original ridge racer in 60fps. my mind was blown. what console and when they did this i don't remember. someone help me here. probably ps2

[BryanM]

I think back to Tobal 2 on the PS1. Not only was it 60 FPS, but it ran at the PS1's highest resolution (around VGA, I think) and had plenty of lighting effects. It still looks phenomenal, and I have no idea how they pulled it off considering how much I usually hate PS1 3D.

Flatshading. Any decent 3d game (visually) from that era had very simple textures going on.

Mario 64 also still looks pretty nice, I think.

[neorichieb1971]

i member when they remixed the original ridge racer in 60fps. my mind was blown. what console and when they did this i don't remember. someone help me here. probably ps2

I believe this is the PS1 version of RR 4 which had the extra RR 60fps disc on it.

To accomplish the 60fps in hi resolution, they reworked the Z - buffering. Which means if the camera didn't display X polygon on the screen it wouldn't be calculated. Where as the original RR was 30fps and calculated the whole circuit whether or not it was on screen. By freeing up about 50% of the processing power, that could then be used to enter the PS1's high resolution mode and lock 60fps. The masters of the PS1 were Psygnosis, who have used that technique in Wipeout 3 for the whole game and have become a modern wonder in nextgen gaming, creating of course Wipeout HD with a locked 60fps in 1080p.


GOW3 was supposed to be 60fps at 1080p as well. But after just playing the demo, its a disappointing 720p with many frame drops. It is work in development so hopefully Santa Monica studios with Naughty Dogs help can get give some sort of boost to the end product.

[Ex-Cyber]

So um... what were these "high-res + 60FPS" PS1 games actually displaying? Last time I checked, a standard-def TV signal is not capable of carrying 480 lines at 60FPS. Were they rendering at 60FPS and just sending out each updated field, or what?

[D]

The RR 60 fps does not run well on a ps3, you get a weird image. Probably because of an unconventional method/resolution used.

[system11]

Eurogamer just reviewed Modern Warfare 2, the review is 3 pages long, and barely mentions the graphics, not mention at all of how smooth it is. There are over 200 comments, and again nobody has even mentioned the frame rate.

What a failure - reviews need to contain facts, not a long paragraph on the morals of of the hugely overhyped civilians scene.

[kengou]

Eurogamer just reviewed Modern Warfare 2, the review is 3 pages long, and barely mentions the graphics, not mention at all of how smooth it is. There are over 200 comments, and again nobody has even mentioned the frame rate.

What a failure - reviews need to contain facts, not a long paragraph on the morals of of the hugely overhyped civilians scene.

Not to mention that no review has really talked about the PC version separately regarding the whole no-dedicated-servers-or-mods-or-more-than-18-players debacle (or whether the game is actually worth $60 on the PC). But that's a whole different issue.

[system11]

It was about time the PC people started being treated like the smallest fish in the pond, instead of getting special treatment. To be honest they're lucky people still make PC games at all, aside from obvious big sellers like WOW.

[Stormwatch]

So um... what were these "high-res + 60FPS" PS1 games actually displaying? Last time I checked, a standard-def TV signal is not capable of carrying 480 lines at 60FPS. Were they rendering at 60FPS and just sending out each updated field, or what?

Standard resolution is interlaced, mind you: it updates every other line 60 times a second.

[Gozer]

I'm going to go a bit off topic here to ask a question that's been bugging me for a while. I'm not terribly tech savvy when it comes to A.V. discussion.

I've recently bought my first HD LCD TV and I have my 360 hooked up to it via HDMI. Let's say I downloaded game play footage of Dead Space. When viewing this footage and the in game camera pans I see no motion blur or image jutter. However, I get the motion blur and image jutter when playing the actual game. What's the situation with that? I would guess it has to do with what FPS the video and actual game play is running at, though I may be wrong about that.

On topic:
I've also been reading alot of reviews for MW2 and have not come across anyone saying how many frames the game runs at. It definitely seems like the majority of console gamers could care less about it.
I'd rather see developers sacrifice some graphical shine in order to have the game running at a steady 60 frames.

[Elixir]

I recently bought a new pc and even though I've spent 80+ hours on the 360 version of Left 4 Dead, the PC version feels much more fluid and realistic. There's some detached sense of reality when you're using a 360 controller and when the zombies don't attack in the same way as the PC one.

I don't know if the 360 version is 30fps or what, I mean it was still enjoyable and stuff but comparing it to the PC version just isn't fair.

[Ed Oscuro]

When viewing this footage and the in game camera pans I see no motion blur or image jutter. However, I get the motion blur and image jutter when playing the actual game. What's the situation with that?

Those terms mean two completely different things to me. Motion blur is a term describing the film effect where motion during a frame blends into the next frame's motion, and is also used to describe the recent gaming phenomenon of simulating this effect. "Judder" (you'd think it would be "jutter" because of the verb "jut," "to project" or "to stick out," but it's "judder" with letter Ds) means that there's gaps between frames, so either the framerate is too low or enough frames are missing at points for your brain to be convinced by the fluidity of the motion, or on top of that there's no motion blur calculated in to mask it visually. Alternatively it could also be an artifact of your TV scaling the console's graphical output. It'd be no great surprise to me to find out that a prerendered movie would go off without any hitches since they've been able to create it under more ideal conditions than running it on the 360.

[kengou]

It was about time the PC people started being treated like the smallest fish in the pond, instead of getting special treatment. To be honest they're lucky people still make PC games at all, aside from obvious big sellers like WOW.

It's about time the console people stopped putting up with crap like shittier versions of once-good PC genres, monthly fees just to play online, terrible pings, more expensive games that come with fewer features, and extra maps and content that actually cost money. It's because of those people that gaming as a whole and PC gaming in particular has degraded so much from the late 90s and early 2000s. How can you possibly blame PC gamers for getting angry because features that have been standard since the beginning of online gaming are being taken away in favor of worse features? Or because we get FPSes (a genre that ought to stay on the PC) developed for consoles first and then ported to the PC with crappy controls and unoptimized code? We haven't been getting special treatment for a LONG time. This whole console generation has been a big slap in the face to PC gamers with the exception of some developers like Valve.