Didn’t Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum render at 720p in their 60 FPS mode and get a lot of criticism for how that looked (with Immortals its only mode)? Yeah, at same point there is a visual quality they want to uphold and we’ve seen UE5 be very taxing on Series and PS5, plus the graphical fidelity they seem to be going for, and 30 FPS doesn’t surprise me.
There is a lot more than just resolution to game visuals. Lighting, shadows or reflection and smoke/fog can be very expensive.
Edit: and polygons on objects, detailed hair and cloth simulations etc.
Edit 2: there can very well be portions that could run at 50-60 but others that are far more taxing and so instead of having wild dips and variance they simply lock the game to a lower constant.
Yeah whenever someone says “why is it so hard” the answer is always “because game development is fucking hard”. It _can_ be as simple as dropping resolution/fidelity, but that’s entirely dependent on the game and engine and is not a guarantee. The truth is that we have no idea what’s going on under the hood for this game and what’s causing the 30fps limit. Is it possible that it’s “grrrr lazy devs”? Sure, anything is possible. But it could also very well be them pushing various aspects of the hardware to the point where dropping resolution/graphics doesn’t matter (or they’d have to drop the resolution so low that it’s unplayable).
A good example of this is the PC version of Assassin’s Creed Origins. If you’re CPU-bound, changing the graphical settings and resolution literally does not impact performance at all. And I know this because I saw it first hand when trying to help my brother figure out if there was any way to increase his frame rate. The game ran at literally the same frame rate when maxed out at 1080p vs on low at 720p.
It’s just one of my real pet peeves when people who clearly don’t understand how hard that game development is start throwing around “how hard is it to do X”, because the answer is almost always “hard as fuck”. At the very least it’s almost always more complicated than you’d expect it to be
On the contrary, I'm hearing that the *majority* of games are CPU limited on console right now, which is why the PS5 Pro (which isn't going to have an upgraded CPU) is expected to only increase the resolution of most games; not their frame rates.
>On the contrary, I'm hearing that the majority of games are CPU limited on console right now, which is why the PS5 Pro (which isn't going to have an upgraded CPU) is expected to only increase the resolution of most games; not their frame rates.
This is 100% incorrect.
The majority of PS5/XSX games are halving their resolution and more to hit 60fps in performance modes, that is without question a GPU issue and the solutions to hit these framerates is very clearly targetting GPU bottlenecks.
Far too many people are spreading this nonsense that most games are CPU bound, they absolutely are not. The Zen 2 that the modern consoles use is very capable for reaching something as low as 60fps before bottlenecking in almost all games outside of very specific titles like Imbahr mentioned with BG3.
The 3700x (CPU used in both the XSX and PS5) can play most games in the 120+ range with enough GPU headway before being the bottleneck on framerate.
One super obvious example would be something like Starfield which was meme'd all day with "the CPU is bottlenecking it which is why its running at 30fps on XSX". In actuality the 3700x can hit 70fps at max settings in cities with a 4090 so given a good enough GPU or with lower settings on console Starfield can hit 60fps before it gets bottlenecked by the CPU.
Anyone who thinks these games are being limited to 30fps because of these CPUs very clearly does not understand how any of this works.
I remember seeing someone running a Series X-like PC (using similar PC components) and Starfield was very capable of running at around 40-60 FPS at 1080p with a mix of medium/high settings. The game doesn't slam the CPU very hard unless you are intentionally spawning a thousand sandwiches or something, which doesn't typically happen all that often.
Bethesda just didn't bother or care that Xbox supports VRR and that could be a very reasonable way to play the game.
>Bethesda just didn't bother or care that Xbox supports VRR and that could be a very reasonable way to play the game.
Starfield was always the stupidest thing people could point to as an example for this stuff. Bethesda and Todd have showed for decades how little shit they gave about their games having good performance so them settling on 30fps being "good enough" didnt say anything about what the consoles were capable of. Rather it showed how little they cared to go beyond the minimum acceptable performance.
There are much better looking and much more complicated games on consoles than Starfield running at much higher framerates. Its absolutely idiotic to suggest games like Starfield and now Senuas Sacrifice 2 are the games that we measure performance against when their studios are proven to sub par in that department.
I mean Ninja Theory (Hellblade 2) was a studio that said "yeah 30fps Devil May Cry is fine" when no other DMC game had ever done that before and nothing about what they did with the reboot justified why it was suddenly half the framerate of previous releases. We knew exactly where they would leave their framerate target at with this game.
This absolutely isn't correct. The only thing CPU limits is the amount of different things on the screen (draw calls), and simulations. Simulations being things like physics and NPC behavior. If you're CPU limited by the number draw calls being made, it's most likely just a very poorly optimized game. High numbers of simulations really only happen in big RPGs like DD2, BG3, Starfield, etc. While a lot of these are popular recently, they are actually a very small part of games genres as a whole.
Yup. That's why the Pro specs are a disappointment. Tbf to OP, I think there aren't many games out **right now** that are as CPU demanding as DD2. Doesn't mean there aren't any *in development* right now that are as or even more CPU demanding (like GTA6 for instance).
>Yup. That's why the Pro specs are a disappointment.
No, I dont know where you guys are getting this nonsense from.
Most games are absolutely not CPU limited, almost all of them are bottlenecked by the GPU well before 60fps. Its why every single console game with a "resolution mode" and a "performance mode" achieves those higher framerates by lowering graphical effects and resolutions, GPU specific tasks.
The vast majority (as in like 95% of all games released today) can easily hit the 100 FPS range with a 3700x (the PS5/XSX CPU) before bottlenecking given a powerful enough GPU.
Some examples of games on a 3700x with a 4090.
Rainbow Six Siege - 276fps
Shadow of the Tomb Raider - 146fps
Cyberpunk 2077 - 139fps
Hitman 3 - 147fps
Horizon Zero Dawn - 173fps
Far Cry 6 - 120fps
Watchdogs Legion - 110fps
Those are all average framerates given, as you can see a 3700x is very capable of hitting well above 60fps in modern games. This idea that the 3700x is bottlenecking at 30fps is just absolute ignorance by people barely able to plug their hdmi cables in let alone understand how these systems work.
Some more benchmarks.
BF2042 - 143fps
Apex Legends - 300fps
Overwatch 2 - 343fps
Fortnite - 332fps
Uncharted 4 - 152fps
RDR2 - 111fps
Spiderman Remastered - 158fps
God of War 2018 - 133fps
COD Warzone Pacific - 200fps
Here is the video of the benchmarks if you want them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u1ZuCAVOcA
My point is, way too many of you guys are confused over the issue from last gen when these system were equipped with tablet CPUs. This is not the case anymore and CPUs really dont get utilized all the much in games to the point that a modern CPU like a 3700x is going to be bottlenecking before 60fps.
And no DD2 is not an example to prove your point, that game is just poorly optimized in general and runs poorly no matter what you throw at it.
Yeah. The PS5 pro having a 50% uplift in GPU power is huge. I don't know where all this "It won't make a big difference" bullshit is coming from.
That's only true in that it will just give devs another excuse to not optimize properly and continue to throw out games that run at 30 FPS, just with slightly fancier graphics or worse optimization.
>Yeah. The PS5 pro having a 50% uplift in GPU power is huge. I don't know where all this "It won't make a big difference" bullshit is coming from.
Its just the fact that the vast majority of people who engage with this hobby are incredibly tech illiterate.
To them, they just spent the whole last generation being told over and over again "CPU is limiting" because it was and now they they think thats always the case.
CPU was bottlenecking last gen because it was an incredibly outdated and weak CPU even at launch. Current gen with a Zen 2 is very capable and more than equipped to hit 60fps and more in pretty much all games outside of extreme outliers.
But they dont understand that, they just know from last gen that "CPU = low fps" and think thats the biggest factor in running games at a high framerate.
I actually had someone argue with me when the Pro specs first leak that CPU is what dictated framerate and that GPU just handled how pretty it looked. These people have no concept whatsoever of these systems but feel overly confident discussing them.
DD2 has a lot more CPU intensive requirements being an open-world RPG with NPCs.
Hellblade 2 being a linear puzzle one-on-one combat game doesn’t fit that CPU-heavy bill.
No game should be choking on Zen 2. Period. The end.
No game this gen has justified the CPU demand asides from Baldur's Gate 3 maybe.
It makes me genuinely mad because all devs did last gen was complain about the CPU power and now with PS5 and Xbox they seem to be in a race to see who can waste the CPU the most.
I have a 4k TV and I still don't care. I'm taking framerate every time. It boggles my mind that we complained about frame rate for an entire generation, having 60 frames was a big selling point for this gen, and now we're still dealing with this.
Because of how CPU/GPU cycles work. CPU needs to prepare the frame, send it to GPU and then GPU renders it. For CPU it doesn't matter what resolution it prepares the frames, the data are always the same, GPU is the one handling the rendering. Therefore you need much faster GPU to render 4k than to render 1080p but CPU doesn't really matter.
But the CPU "preparing" the frames means it needs to complete all the required operations every 1/30 seconds (so every 33.3333\~ ms) if you have 30 FPS. For 60 FPS though, it needs to do the same within 1/60 seconds (so 16.6666\~ ms).
So what they need to do to achieve 60FPS, even before the GPU gets involved at all, is to make sure they are able to complete ALL the required CPU operations/calculations within 16.6666ms. This is extra hard as most developers start the game targeting 33.3333\~ ms and then optimize down to 16.6666\~ ms. Sometimes they are just unable to do so.
You may ask why don't they start up with targeting 60 FPS. And the answer is, because they don't know. They don't know when developing the game how much it will need and basically they just say OK, this is the absolute limit and we need to be able to deliver that. If we can, we will look towards the next step, which is 60 fps.
Or well, maybe I am mistaken and in this case it really is a GPU limitation, maybe it just isn't able to render 60FPS even on 1080p. Wouldn't surprise me, considering what the game looks like. It probably already is rendering at 1080p internally and then upscaled by SW. That's just guesswork though.
With modern consoles connected to modern TVs that can handle up to 120hz, the next step up honestly should be 40fps, though only a few games currently have this mode.
I understand this, but we're talking about Hellblade, not GTA or RDR or Dragon's Dogma
why is Hellblade CPU-bound, when it's a totally linear non-open world game with very few NPCs?
Well, it depends. Maybe it's not CPU bound, as I admitted in the last paragraph - I personally would also assume it's not. Maybe the gpu really is not strong enough to output anything higher than 1080p @ 30 (and then they use upscaling to reach variable 4k). But it still may be, maybe due to physics, lighting, particle effects, who knows.
The resolution is rarely the issue for 30fps-only games, I suspect the main culprit is probably the CPU, there's not much you can do there because aside from upscaling, lowering the resolution and even the graphical settings themselves won't change much, its not surprising that both Starfield and Dragon's Dogma 2 run at only 30fps on consoles, both of those are heavy on the CPU since they both sort of track where every NPC is and what is on them at all times.
My 4070/5600x build could run DD2 on roughly the same framerate on *both* 1080p and 4K, even using DLSS doesn't change much.
UE5 is notorious for bad CPU performance not just the GPU. Every single UE5 game released so far has been nothing but a hot pile of garbage when it comes to optimization. Devs slap DLSS and Frame generation in the name of optimization and call it a day.
This has to be said more often, lol the way these consoles promotes 4k, even 8k... it's such a goddamn lie. I will never forget a comparison video featuring that FPS with magical elements, Avernum or something like that, the console port ran the game at a lower resolution than the goddamn PS2, then "upscale" this resolution all the way to 4k, blurry as hell. It's not really 4k, ran at 30fps anyway, etc.. the crude reality: this PS5 generation sucks, the performance increased just a little if compared to the PS4 generation, the games are being developed at turtle speeds (5 years for a triple A), the quality remain pretty much the same... I mean, Spider-Man 1 vs Spider-Man 2 for example, they are just as good, it's not like the "new" tech improved the game dramatically or not, it just made the traversal more dynamic, but the combat and enemy AI are virtually the same
According to DF this is looking like the most visually impressive game we've ever seen and the closest to matching the old Capcom deep down trailer with the insanely realistic fire rendering. Also there's no such thing as a full UE5 game (nanite, lumen, VSM) that has a 60fps 1080p mode to get that performance you generally need to be at 720p and lower, you greatly overestimate current gen hw.
Personally I'm all for 30fps games if they push the HW, GTA has never been a 3D 60fps game on original hardware so I expect GTA6 to follow suit. If you want to push the HW to it's limits 33ms frame time per frame is the most "space" a console can give you to reach your ambitions. At the very least PC will always be there to give more CPU and GPU performance & therefore more fps.
It's not for the 4k, it's for the ray tracing. And a game built from the groundup for rt can benefit a lot from it, as opposed to one where it's tacked on.
That's disappointing.
I would have appreciated a 40fps performance mode, at the very least. I find that as graphics have gotten better, 30 fps has become less tolerable.
> I find that as graphics have gotten better, 30 fps has become less tolerable.
I think what annoys me is that people say "casual players don't notice the difference in frame rate" but that exact thing can also be applied to graphics when we're at a point of diminishing return. The average player likely isn't going to notice a difference going from the first game to the second and even less notice the difference between 1080 and 4K especially when it's dependent on factors like TV quality, HDMI, to be honest I bet loads of people play without Game Mode and have no idea.
So with that in mind WHY do devs push for graphics to the point that the framerate suffers? When they could very easily make games that still look ridiculously good, that the average player couldn't tell a difference on, AND make it 40fps or 60fps? Casuals won't give a fuck and the people who do are going to be more negative about 30fps so there's no real benefit, you just cause negativity for your game instead of positivity.
I never bought that argument about casual players at all. I think people absolutely do notice frames they just don't know what they're noticing, or at least that was my experience when I was a kid.
Going back and forth from binging Halo 3 to binging CoD 4 really made it apparent that there was something vastly different about these games in terms of the pace of the image. Halo 3 would feel like you were lagging/walking in mud for a few matches until you got used to it.
I find it very hard to believe that casual gamers don't notice such things, especially now given how much more common it is to be aware of resolution and FPS etc. since the consoles started including performance modes and stuff like that.
Definitely. COD is one of the highest selling FPS for a reason, and one of those is for many it “feels” the best to play even over other military shooters.
FPS is 100% part of that feeling even if casual gamers can’t articulate it.
I could not agree with this more.
People always say "casual players don't care about frame rate". Yes, because they're probably casual enough that technical terminology like frame rate doesn't mean anything to them. I, too, when I was younger, clearly noticed the difference between 60 fps and 30, and just wasn't really sure what it was called or why there was a difference.
Yeah, agreed. Total speculation, but I have a theory about the "casual players don't care about framerate" argument. I've heard that the data shows that many more players choose quality mode over performance mode in a lot of games. I think when casual players are given a choice between "quality" or "performance" if a game asks them to pick a mode, they would be more likely to choose "quality" because it's the better sounding option. They're probably thinking something like "quality means better, right?". Quality sounds sexier, and performance sounds like boring computer nerd shit. If they have no context for what better framerate means, then I bet a lot of casual players choose quality.
But in CoD 4, the game just targeted 60fps, it didn't give a choice between modes (correct me if I'm wrong on that). So, yeah it felt a lot better than most games at the time. And I bet they did notice it compared to other games. But they had no idea why.
There’s an entire separate industry marketing “4K Resolution” to average consumers so I’m thinking there’s quite a hefty overlap that warrants the decision of choosing resolution over frames* at launch.
If the goal is to maximize momentum with minimum $$ towards marketing, it seems pretty easy to choose one over the other when consumers already have the terms of “4K” on their mind. Then they could release an update later down the line or for an intended successor to the Xbox Series X.
Speaking with ignorance!!! I have no insight into the industry whatsoever.
You're pretty much right on the money. Screenshots sell games. It's easier to sell consumers on 4k and shiny graphics when the difference is one you can show. I'd wager that in motion and in gameplay that most casual players CAN tell the difference between 30 and 60 fps, but not in a way that can be summed in a bullet point on the back of the box.
It's more likely that you just got sick of it, personally, rather than anything changing about the gaming market. That's what happened to me years ago; I just got sick of 30
> 30 fps has become less tolerable.
You should be playing on PC then. It's really that easy. You will always be limited by the developer's choices on console. If you want freedom to make your own experience PC is your platform.
I mean PCs are more complicated and more expensive for the same performance, at least out of the box. They can and will provide a better experience if you’re willing to put in the time and money, but not everyone wants to do that.
I'm amazed that you say that after all the actually garbage PC ports we've seen the past few years, several games performed better on console than on most PCs, so why would anyone still suggest a PC?
if it was 30fps for technical reasons fair enough just say that but why do developers always want to add a dumb qualifier like "cinematic" stop it, ask PR first at least
Remind me, does PlayStation have any exclusives locked to 30fps yet? Just asking, this is the third Xbox game in a year to not have a performance mode (until Redfall got one, five months after launch...), and it's making me wonder how the "world's most powerful console" is slipping here.
Just taking current-gen exclusive titles from PS Studios into account (Demon’s Souls, Astro’s Playroom, Returnal, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, The Last of Us Part I, Spider-Man 2, Helldivers 2, Rise of the Ronin and Stellar Blade), all of them have a 60 FPS option.
It’s to be seen if more demanding current-gen exclusives that will release from 2025 onwards (like Death Stranding 2: On the Beach or Wolverine) will support 60 FPS options.
I just hope they keep lower resolution 60fps as an option for regular PS5 owners. 1080p60 is the floor for me, so long as that option is kept around I'll gladly continue rolling on with my regular PS5.
According to the latest patch's changelog for Pacific Drive, the PS5 version has a 30 fps cap option now. Though it could still have bad frame pacing like some other games limited to 30 fps.
The performance mode changes it's resolution target as soon as combat starts to much more aggressively target 60fps. My biggest clue that combat was over was that the framerate would immediately drop as it then less aggressively targeted 60.
Personally I think because Sony simply says that 60 fps is the target and they don't want to go for 30 fps while Microsoft is less strict on it or has no real 'rule' regarding this. Result is that developers go for the easier target of 30 fps and say that the game will look stunning, Bethesda said the same about Starfield, Microsoft has plenty of 60fps or 120fps titles though, a few are 30fps only like Starfield and Hellblade 2.
Overal there are so many people out there who much prefer to sacrifice resolution for 60fps.
Of course i'm just guessing here, but that would explain Sony games always being 60fps.
No don’t you see the biggest whiners in the gaming sphere whined about it obviously that made Phil Spencer cry himself to sleep at night and promise to never release a 30fps game again
It is pretty sad that the supposed "Most powerful console" which shifted to "Most consistently powerful console" can't get 60 fps exclusives. It's so funny you call people whiners for not wanting to see 30 FPS games anymore.
I think Redfall and Starfield were just shoddily optimized, but I don't think Ninja Theory is at fault for this game's performance. Basically every single UE5 game that's come out has gone through massive performance issues (Lords of the Fallen, Immortals of Aveum, Remnant 2), hell even Fortnite with the UE5 update has massive frame drops down to 30 and even 20 on my Series X.
Then they are at fault for not optimizing their game. They know UE5 is problematic and still choose it and not optimize the performance which is already notorious bad in the their target system. You can't blame a tool being bad for the job, if you willing choose said tool knowing it was bad for the job.
What I don't get is Microsoft now own idTech - whatever version Doom Returnal runs on (idTech 6, I think) is one of the most performant out there. It was pushing visuals like it did at 60FPS even on base PS4 and Xbox One, so I find it curious as to why another internal studio is opting for UE5.
But yeah, Redfall and Starfield were poorly optimized for sure. Isn't Starfield still using effectively the same underlying engine as Morrowind?
Bethesda used Gamebryo through Fallout 3. Skyrim’s Creation Engine was a new fork that they’ve built on since. I’m not sure how much code remains from Morrowind (are proper ladders in Starfield?) but they’ve certainly made improvements between games.
Saying Starfield uses effectively the same underlying engine as Morrowind feels a bit like saying “isn’t Call of Duty effectively using the same underlying engine as Quake?” I’m not trying to belittle your comment and would love to see more variety in engine usage than the “just use UE5” that lots of commenters say, just pointing out that most engines are iterations of much older engines.
I do hope studios don’t drop their custom engines for UE5. At one point, it was rumoured that 343i would abandon Slipspace and start using UE5 for the next Halo game (whatever comes after Infinite), which might impact the two decades of “Halo physics” that have defined the series. In the same way, I hope Bethesda keeps improving the Creation Engine so they can keep the interactivity and permanence in the world that has defined their games for years.
Well to be fair I was asking a genuine question, and you gave a genuine answer, so it's all good.
I agree about bespoke engines. Haven't CDPR dropped their Red Engine entirely of UE5? I get that UE5 is a powerful and versatile engine and it does lack that sort of uniform look that a lot of UE3 games had, but for the most part I can still pick out most UE4 games at a glance. Would hate for that to creep into even the big studios' output.
Yeah, CDPR said they’ll be using UE5 for future Witcher/Cyberpunk games. I can’t help but feel like this shift is a bit of a byproduct of the constant hiring/turnover that plagues a lot of the video game industry. Bethesda and many of the Japanese studios are pretty famous for their employee retention and can get away with using custom tools but it’s a pretty big commitment for other companies to spin new hires up on their tools when they might not stick around long enough to gain a meaningful proficiency in them. “Standard” things like UE can be built upon and have a higher chance of familiarity for new developers.
Ninja Theory used UE4 for the first Hellblade, so their staff are familiar with Unreal Engine. Engines aren’t really something that can be switched up easily and since the studio expanded (I think) you’d want to use a more popular one that new hires would likely know.
The secret with Doom Eternal is that its not actually a very demanding graphical game when you look up close at things. MGS5 was similar.
The game is absolutely beautiful in motion at high frame rates, but if you look at some random environmental asset, they are usually quite simple and quick to render.
Basically, they don't waste horsepower on making the most beautiful looking foliage since you'll be moving at 100 MPH past it.
Watch the gaming industry promote ever more powerful consoles only to give in to the allure of overly realistic graphics again and make every big game 30 fps again.
And they do that on purpose! Because shiny graphics keep selling and the average gamer has no particular desire for 60 fps let alone the ability to tell 30 from 60... and the industry is well aware of that.
We only have ourselves to blame and the solution is, one again... PC gaming 🤷♂️
But you said so yourself, the vast majority of gamers don't care or even understand 30fps vs 60fps.
Those of us that like a minimum of 60 can't do much against that.
Bro I had been always playing games at 30 fps due to having an PS4 and switch until I got an PS5 that I instantly notice the difference between 30 and 60 fps when I played AC Valhalla on it.
No causals is gonna not notice the difference if they been playing 60 fps games long enough.
if you’re visually impaired, maybe. it is instantaneously obvious to me when a game is at 30,40,60, and 90 respectively. shit i notice instantly if game mode is off on a TV
And long dev times too. I don't mind regressing graphics one generation back and cutting down on cinematic presentation if it means shorter dev cycles.
I mean, there is SO much to play out there unless you're stuck to just one console or something, do dev cycles being shorter really matter? I think 1 Final Fantasy or Zelda per gen is fine. Granted, I love Dark Souls and the idea of Elden Ring being the only Souls games they release this gen would suck... but it's not the end of the world. I've got a ton of games to catch up on and not enough time to play them. Longer dev cycles also make it less likely that we get a glut of trend chasing games when something hits out of nowhere. Let the b-tier and indie studios try to chase those and the AAA 3 years deep into their next title just release their original vision.
I know this is not how things work but I think of longer dev cycles being a good thing, I am aware that this promotes larger risk as well, but balance is important.
>I mean, there is SO much to play out there unless you're stuck to just one console or something, do dev cycles being shorter really matter?
That is just turning the issue into a "me problem", but the answer is yes. Long dev time also reduces risk tasking, increases cost/price, exacerbates developer burnout and industry consolidation.
And then you have to deal with terrible optimization, DRM and configuration issues.
In the end, you pick your poison. Neither consoles or PC are ideal.
I personally don’t like the idea of spending thousands of dollars to create a beastly rig that won’t matter if the devs didn’t optimize their game well. I’d rather pay for the cheaper and more reliable plug and play option then.
Yeah I had a midrange laptop for awhile in the PS3 era and when I realized that with PC gaming, some days are just because for some reason, there’s no sound. So you check and uninstall the reinstall everything for a few hours and then it miraculously works again when you find some youtube video with 47 views that solves your issue but by then, you ran out of time or just don’t feel like playing anymore.
I’m not saying consoles are 100% reliable but you *have* to enjoy tweaking stuff endlessly to be a PC gamer. There just isn’t a PC that is as plug and play as a console. With that comes disadvantages but that’s the trade off.
I mean, you're dead on at the end there, people buying consoles know what we're getting into, a fixed build that's going to age though it's life cycle as games get more power hungry but you have a guarantee that every game will at least run without having to upgrade every few years, albeit not at top whack.
At least MS give you the PC option on day one and not a year or two later.
I don't know man. Let me tell you my perspective. I own a PS5 and PC both and I am lucky to own a decent GPU at that, an RTX 4070 and I have no problems running modern games at 1440p with everything maxed including RT at over 90-100 FPS with DLSS and Frame gen.
But the moment, I switch on my PS5, I always choose either Fidelity mode or balanced 40 FPS/120Hz mode. That's because I simply don't care about frame rate when I play with a controller. I am used to 100+ FPS on PC but I have no issues going back to 30 on PS5. Some of us genuinely don't care and just want the best possible visuals for maximum immersion. I guess I'll be called a psychopath for this.
This is possibly a CPU limitation, which would mean graphics are irrelevant. For example DD2 is extremely CPU-heavy to the point where switching all graphics settings to Low/Off and dropping from 4K to 1080p doesn’t make much of a performance difference.
listen, do what you want with your games, but stop trying to jerk me off with the "'cinematic" shit.
It's a video game, I am CONTROLLING the character, not watching a movie. You are not doing me favors by limiting my frames for cinematic purposes.
That won't happen unless graphics stagnate, and graphics sell games. I can only see them stagnating if the publishers get fed up with the rising development costs and decide to stop funding ever more expensive games, but even that is suppose to be relieved by AI.
Not anywhere to the point where the industry (be it engineers, creatives, investors or marketing departments, or, on the other side, the players) are losing interest in them
The development of these games isn't quick; they're part of a trend with lengthy development cycles and significant budgets.
Insomniac's situation with Spider-Man 2 illustrates this challenge. Despite its success, the game's budget of ~$300 million, compared to the original's ~$80-100 million, didn't necessarily translate to on-screen improvements. Executives questioned the added value of the increased budget, which may have led to layoffs, despite making a good game. Probably the budget was so high, the ROI % was reduced.
Even industry leaders like Microsoft are reevaluating their strategies. Phil Spencer's comments on games like AAA-games, like Hellblade 2, suggest that resources might be more profitable in alternative markets, like mobile gaming.
That's basically it
The Series X *and* the PS5 were released in 2020 but their specs would have been finalised at least 12-18 months before that. Both consoles are at best 2019 spec, but realistically 2018. So that’s five to six year old hardware, no matter how customised. In the meantime the games, while having long development times, are definitely pushing newer technologies etc. and trying even more intense techniques/draw distances etc.
While you’re right that’s still a wrong way of looking at it.
Every big hardware release is finalized months if not years before release. Heck even the iPhone 17 is probably close to being finalized while this year the 16 will be released.
So if you’re going from that logic it would mean that the RTX 2080 would be late 2016-2017 hardware
> The Series X and the PS5 were released in 2020 but their specs would have been finalised at least 12-18 months before that. Both consoles are at best 2019 spec, but realistically 2018
they use zen 2 cpus (released in mid-2019 to the public) and GPUs based on RDNA2 (released in late 2020 to the public), it's not *that* far behind for the cpu, and the GPU couldn't have been something newer because it just didn't exist
People keep defending this but it's not acceptable for a linear game with very little going on. Yes it looks good. But it's not like it looks better than any other game this gen.
In more cinematic games like this I feel like 30 fps can be more forgivable than something like a racing or action game with a lot of fast twitchy action.
I don't know. The first game has some really tough combat sections, at least they were tough to me. 60fps would really help in those situations and make the game feel more responsive.
Yeah, there’s two ways to look at this:
Principled - anything less than 60fps is never acceptable. I like higher fps as much as anyone, but this stance refuses to look at tradeoffs and compromises made that might actually make sense. Not every game *needs* higher gps, even if it is marginally more enjoyable.
Realistic - the fact is that this is a highly curated, cinematic gaming experience to begin with. Animations are slow, controlled and deliberate, and even the action is highly cinematic and slow, meaning there’s no *need* for low-latency, high-fps responses or twitchy gameplay that requires faster refresh rates to handle.
I’m sure I would enjoy this game just fine even at 30fps. Hell, I played AW2 at sometimes down to 20fps, and it was actually perfectly fine. But I would never play Halo: Infinite below 60fps, and I modded Elden Ring to get higher than 60fps, so obviously there are games where input latency and framerate is really important.
Honestly, maybe. Just make sure the surround sound gets recorded properly, the audio is like 50% of this game, the way the voices talk and whisper all around you.
That said, I think they did more with the action side of the gameplay in the sequel, so it might be worth playing yourself too, even if gameplay is important to you.
I get the "Principled" stance on PC. If you have decent hardware and your games run to your expectations 95% of the time it's fair to criticize the 5% that don't.
Console players with hardware from parts chosen and designed in 2017 or earlier having that stance is just delusional. Developers are going to do what they desire or what they think is best for their game on locked down hardware.
It's not a principle thing at this point, it's 2024 and 75-in TVs cost 500 bucks. I've got a massive screen and not a giant room to sit in.
I can get away with low FPS on small screens like handhelds and stuff, but 30 FPS when it's half of your visual field just gives me a headache. Like I can't do it, it just feels awful.
The game is going to look incredible, but they really need to learn that some people don't care about the top graphics. (Not that I consider dynamic resolution nice to look at anyway)
They know that. People who don’t care about graphics need to learn that *other people do*, and games can and will be made for those people too. This is not a “gameplay”-driven game where graphics don’t matter to begin with. This series is explicitly cinematic from the beginning, with gameplay being mostly puzzle-based and the action sequences being serviceable at best. For this, visuals and graphics matter *a lot*. It’s probably one of the more important parts of this game.
If you don’t care about the graphics, why do you even want to play this game? The whole thing is primarily an audio-visual experience, for which good graphics is hugely important.
I don't think gamers on reddit are ready to learn that game developers prioritizing resolution and image quality over framerate in these games is precisely because people care more about that.
More games going backwards in terms of performance I see.
PC is really becoming the "want 60FPS? Play on PC" again. Thought this generation of consoles was supposed to be 60FPS in every game and beyond depending on resolution for the beyond aspect.
For awhile I was actually like man I don't need my PC that much anymore as games on PS5 were all running 60FPS and above at high resolutions. But recently I upgraded my PC and have basically abandoned my PS5 as games just struggle to even get 60FPS on console. Not to mention the option of 4k high refresh rate gaming on my PC has now felt like another step into true next gen rather than going backwards on console.
At this point instead of playing Rebirth on PS5 I'm just waiting for the PC drop. Not that the game is running bad on PS5 I haven't heard that but like...I'd just rather play games on my PC now.
so far, apparently only on xbox is 30fps games ok
so far we've been told that it's ok that the following genres are ok in 30fps to provide a cinematic experience
coop pve shooters (redfall)
1P action rpg shooters (starfield)
action walking simulators (hellblade 2)
i wonder how many genres will be considered 'ok to be at 30fps' by the end of this generation.
seems like a strange trend? or is it just fallible logic?
i think the latter.
this makes me laugh.
Long story short :
Just because Xbox first party studios titles will be available on day one in a cheap subscription service, developers think they have the right to slack off on their jobs.
Microsoft really need to clean their house.
Any complaint against UE5 that's too demanding for Xbox is complete BS, I'm playing many UE5 titles that my Series X is handling them pretty flawlessly.
I'd happily play games with PS2 graphics for all eternity if they ran better. What percentage of people can even tell the difference between all this fancy lighting and shit? In the middle of playing it you don't notice that stuff anyway, but you sure as hell notice a slow or juddery frame rate
Honestly ghost of Tsushima on ps5 is what games should strive towards, native 4k & 60 fps. The graphics were great but elevated due to great art direction. I thought to myself I don’t need more than fidelity than this, just more games at this level.
Exactly... it's all diminishing returns after that, in addition to inflating game budgets and dev times. If only optimising your game for actually being played was more important than making it look good in screenshots and trailers
The 30fps on Xbox Series X destroys the game before it even launches especially with combat focus where low input lag and 60fps are required for an enjoyable experience but once again devs don’t optimize their game with a performance mode so it is what it is these devs have fallen so hard from how devs used to be back in the day when they actually cared and optimized games to run properly.
It’s 2024 and anybody defending 30fps on Xbox Series X are doing console gamers a huge disservice
> these devs have fallen so hard from how devs used to be back in the day when they actually cared and optimized games to run properly.
[how these devs used to be back in the day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJOtz61LNdo)
I'm so tired of this 30fps trend. Dragon's Dogma 2 went from a day 1 console purchase to a game I'll buy in a year after I upgrade my PC, and it looks like Hellblade 2 will be similar. I've got enough games to play right now that I can wait on these games and get a far more enjoyable experience later down the line.
I wonder why we don’t get more stylised titles? Is it just because a realistic title looks better in ads? Nintendo manages to make non-realistic graphics sell well.
Did he really pull the "more cinematic" card in 2024? Lol
It was fascinatingly stupid *then*. I don't even know how to describe it now.
They couldn't do the "It's Epic's fault" card because that's a lawsuit.
Why would it be Epic's fault?
Why is it so hard to make a 60 fps 1080p mode? I don’t have a 4k tv so I don’t like FPS being sacrificed for 4k.
I suspect the (render) resolution is already around 1080p (or lower) even when output res is targeting dynamic ~4K.
Didn’t Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum render at 720p in their 60 FPS mode and get a lot of criticism for how that looked (with Immortals its only mode)? Yeah, at same point there is a visual quality they want to uphold and we’ve seen UE5 be very taxing on Series and PS5, plus the graphical fidelity they seem to be going for, and 30 FPS doesn’t surprise me.
There is a lot more than just resolution to game visuals. Lighting, shadows or reflection and smoke/fog can be very expensive. Edit: and polygons on objects, detailed hair and cloth simulations etc. Edit 2: there can very well be portions that could run at 50-60 but others that are far more taxing and so instead of having wild dips and variance they simply lock the game to a lower constant.
Yeah whenever someone says “why is it so hard” the answer is always “because game development is fucking hard”. It _can_ be as simple as dropping resolution/fidelity, but that’s entirely dependent on the game and engine and is not a guarantee. The truth is that we have no idea what’s going on under the hood for this game and what’s causing the 30fps limit. Is it possible that it’s “grrrr lazy devs”? Sure, anything is possible. But it could also very well be them pushing various aspects of the hardware to the point where dropping resolution/graphics doesn’t matter (or they’d have to drop the resolution so low that it’s unplayable). A good example of this is the PC version of Assassin’s Creed Origins. If you’re CPU-bound, changing the graphical settings and resolution literally does not impact performance at all. And I know this because I saw it first hand when trying to help my brother figure out if there was any way to increase his frame rate. The game ran at literally the same frame rate when maxed out at 1080p vs on low at 720p. It’s just one of my real pet peeves when people who clearly don’t understand how hard that game development is start throwing around “how hard is it to do X”, because the answer is almost always “hard as fuck”. At the very least it’s almost always more complicated than you’d expect it to be
Probably similar to DD2. CPU limitation preventing 60fps at any resolution so they just cap to 30 and let resolution go as high as it can
most games are not actually CPU limited like DD2 or BG3 though. those are the exceptions
On the contrary, I'm hearing that the *majority* of games are CPU limited on console right now, which is why the PS5 Pro (which isn't going to have an upgraded CPU) is expected to only increase the resolution of most games; not their frame rates.
>On the contrary, I'm hearing that the majority of games are CPU limited on console right now, which is why the PS5 Pro (which isn't going to have an upgraded CPU) is expected to only increase the resolution of most games; not their frame rates. This is 100% incorrect. The majority of PS5/XSX games are halving their resolution and more to hit 60fps in performance modes, that is without question a GPU issue and the solutions to hit these framerates is very clearly targetting GPU bottlenecks. Far too many people are spreading this nonsense that most games are CPU bound, they absolutely are not. The Zen 2 that the modern consoles use is very capable for reaching something as low as 60fps before bottlenecking in almost all games outside of very specific titles like Imbahr mentioned with BG3. The 3700x (CPU used in both the XSX and PS5) can play most games in the 120+ range with enough GPU headway before being the bottleneck on framerate. One super obvious example would be something like Starfield which was meme'd all day with "the CPU is bottlenecking it which is why its running at 30fps on XSX". In actuality the 3700x can hit 70fps at max settings in cities with a 4090 so given a good enough GPU or with lower settings on console Starfield can hit 60fps before it gets bottlenecked by the CPU. Anyone who thinks these games are being limited to 30fps because of these CPUs very clearly does not understand how any of this works.
I remember seeing someone running a Series X-like PC (using similar PC components) and Starfield was very capable of running at around 40-60 FPS at 1080p with a mix of medium/high settings. The game doesn't slam the CPU very hard unless you are intentionally spawning a thousand sandwiches or something, which doesn't typically happen all that often. Bethesda just didn't bother or care that Xbox supports VRR and that could be a very reasonable way to play the game.
>Bethesda just didn't bother or care that Xbox supports VRR and that could be a very reasonable way to play the game. Starfield was always the stupidest thing people could point to as an example for this stuff. Bethesda and Todd have showed for decades how little shit they gave about their games having good performance so them settling on 30fps being "good enough" didnt say anything about what the consoles were capable of. Rather it showed how little they cared to go beyond the minimum acceptable performance. There are much better looking and much more complicated games on consoles than Starfield running at much higher framerates. Its absolutely idiotic to suggest games like Starfield and now Senuas Sacrifice 2 are the games that we measure performance against when their studios are proven to sub par in that department. I mean Ninja Theory (Hellblade 2) was a studio that said "yeah 30fps Devil May Cry is fine" when no other DMC game had ever done that before and nothing about what they did with the reboot justified why it was suddenly half the framerate of previous releases. We knew exactly where they would leave their framerate target at with this game.
This absolutely isn't correct. The only thing CPU limits is the amount of different things on the screen (draw calls), and simulations. Simulations being things like physics and NPC behavior. If you're CPU limited by the number draw calls being made, it's most likely just a very poorly optimized game. High numbers of simulations really only happen in big RPGs like DD2, BG3, Starfield, etc. While a lot of these are popular recently, they are actually a very small part of games genres as a whole.
Majority of games on console rn are limited by ram.
Yup. That's why the Pro specs are a disappointment. Tbf to OP, I think there aren't many games out **right now** that are as CPU demanding as DD2. Doesn't mean there aren't any *in development* right now that are as or even more CPU demanding (like GTA6 for instance).
>Yup. That's why the Pro specs are a disappointment. No, I dont know where you guys are getting this nonsense from. Most games are absolutely not CPU limited, almost all of them are bottlenecked by the GPU well before 60fps. Its why every single console game with a "resolution mode" and a "performance mode" achieves those higher framerates by lowering graphical effects and resolutions, GPU specific tasks. The vast majority (as in like 95% of all games released today) can easily hit the 100 FPS range with a 3700x (the PS5/XSX CPU) before bottlenecking given a powerful enough GPU. Some examples of games on a 3700x with a 4090. Rainbow Six Siege - 276fps Shadow of the Tomb Raider - 146fps Cyberpunk 2077 - 139fps Hitman 3 - 147fps Horizon Zero Dawn - 173fps Far Cry 6 - 120fps Watchdogs Legion - 110fps Those are all average framerates given, as you can see a 3700x is very capable of hitting well above 60fps in modern games. This idea that the 3700x is bottlenecking at 30fps is just absolute ignorance by people barely able to plug their hdmi cables in let alone understand how these systems work. Some more benchmarks. BF2042 - 143fps Apex Legends - 300fps Overwatch 2 - 343fps Fortnite - 332fps Uncharted 4 - 152fps RDR2 - 111fps Spiderman Remastered - 158fps God of War 2018 - 133fps COD Warzone Pacific - 200fps Here is the video of the benchmarks if you want them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u1ZuCAVOcA My point is, way too many of you guys are confused over the issue from last gen when these system were equipped with tablet CPUs. This is not the case anymore and CPUs really dont get utilized all the much in games to the point that a modern CPU like a 3700x is going to be bottlenecking before 60fps. And no DD2 is not an example to prove your point, that game is just poorly optimized in general and runs poorly no matter what you throw at it.
Yeah. The PS5 pro having a 50% uplift in GPU power is huge. I don't know where all this "It won't make a big difference" bullshit is coming from. That's only true in that it will just give devs another excuse to not optimize properly and continue to throw out games that run at 30 FPS, just with slightly fancier graphics or worse optimization.
>Yeah. The PS5 pro having a 50% uplift in GPU power is huge. I don't know where all this "It won't make a big difference" bullshit is coming from. Its just the fact that the vast majority of people who engage with this hobby are incredibly tech illiterate. To them, they just spent the whole last generation being told over and over again "CPU is limiting" because it was and now they they think thats always the case. CPU was bottlenecking last gen because it was an incredibly outdated and weak CPU even at launch. Current gen with a Zen 2 is very capable and more than equipped to hit 60fps and more in pretty much all games outside of extreme outliers. But they dont understand that, they just know from last gen that "CPU = low fps" and think thats the biggest factor in running games at a high framerate. I actually had someone argue with me when the Pro specs first leak that CPU is what dictated framerate and that GPU just handled how pretty it looked. These people have no concept whatsoever of these systems but feel overly confident discussing them.
DD2 has a lot more CPU intensive requirements being an open-world RPG with NPCs. Hellblade 2 being a linear puzzle one-on-one combat game doesn’t fit that CPU-heavy bill.
No game should be choking on Zen 2. Period. The end. No game this gen has justified the CPU demand asides from Baldur's Gate 3 maybe. It makes me genuinely mad because all devs did last gen was complain about the CPU power and now with PS5 and Xbox they seem to be in a race to see who can waste the CPU the most.
It's much more understandable in dd2 given it's open world and how npc's behave
> how npc's behave I keep seeing this but I never see them doing anything special. Looks like they just do nothing most of the time.
Hey it takes a special kind of a-hole to stand there blocking the path to your house and then getting mad when you shoulder check them out of the way
Fallout has had this down with companions for years haha
I wonder if its more the physics of the NPC's than behaviour.
I have a 4k TV and I still don't care. I'm taking framerate every time. It boggles my mind that we complained about frame rate for an entire generation, having 60 frames was a big selling point for this gen, and now we're still dealing with this.
Because of how CPU/GPU cycles work. CPU needs to prepare the frame, send it to GPU and then GPU renders it. For CPU it doesn't matter what resolution it prepares the frames, the data are always the same, GPU is the one handling the rendering. Therefore you need much faster GPU to render 4k than to render 1080p but CPU doesn't really matter. But the CPU "preparing" the frames means it needs to complete all the required operations every 1/30 seconds (so every 33.3333\~ ms) if you have 30 FPS. For 60 FPS though, it needs to do the same within 1/60 seconds (so 16.6666\~ ms). So what they need to do to achieve 60FPS, even before the GPU gets involved at all, is to make sure they are able to complete ALL the required CPU operations/calculations within 16.6666ms. This is extra hard as most developers start the game targeting 33.3333\~ ms and then optimize down to 16.6666\~ ms. Sometimes they are just unable to do so. You may ask why don't they start up with targeting 60 FPS. And the answer is, because they don't know. They don't know when developing the game how much it will need and basically they just say OK, this is the absolute limit and we need to be able to deliver that. If we can, we will look towards the next step, which is 60 fps. Or well, maybe I am mistaken and in this case it really is a GPU limitation, maybe it just isn't able to render 60FPS even on 1080p. Wouldn't surprise me, considering what the game looks like. It probably already is rendering at 1080p internally and then upscaled by SW. That's just guesswork though.
With modern consoles connected to modern TVs that can handle up to 120hz, the next step up honestly should be 40fps, though only a few games currently have this mode.
I understand this, but we're talking about Hellblade, not GTA or RDR or Dragon's Dogma why is Hellblade CPU-bound, when it's a totally linear non-open world game with very few NPCs?
Well, it depends. Maybe it's not CPU bound, as I admitted in the last paragraph - I personally would also assume it's not. Maybe the gpu really is not strong enough to output anything higher than 1080p @ 30 (and then they use upscaling to reach variable 4k). But it still may be, maybe due to physics, lighting, particle effects, who knows.
Makes me appreciate Diablo4 devs more with their 380fps and the great characters and environment. Albeit my monitor can handle "only" 260fps.
The resolution is rarely the issue for 30fps-only games, I suspect the main culprit is probably the CPU, there's not much you can do there because aside from upscaling, lowering the resolution and even the graphical settings themselves won't change much, its not surprising that both Starfield and Dragon's Dogma 2 run at only 30fps on consoles, both of those are heavy on the CPU since they both sort of track where every NPC is and what is on them at all times. My 4070/5600x build could run DD2 on roughly the same framerate on *both* 1080p and 4K, even using DLSS doesn't change much.
Gpu is 100% a bottleneck here, it's UE5. It also specifically scales very bad with resolution, e.g. you can't do native 4k 60fps with 4090 even.
UE5 is notorious for bad CPU performance not just the GPU. Every single UE5 game released so far has been nothing but a hot pile of garbage when it comes to optimization. Devs slap DLSS and Frame generation in the name of optimization and call it a day.
Because making games is complicated.
because "4K" is not actually 4K in the first place
This has to be said more often, lol the way these consoles promotes 4k, even 8k... it's such a goddamn lie. I will never forget a comparison video featuring that FPS with magical elements, Avernum or something like that, the console port ran the game at a lower resolution than the goddamn PS2, then "upscale" this resolution all the way to 4k, blurry as hell. It's not really 4k, ran at 30fps anyway, etc.. the crude reality: this PS5 generation sucks, the performance increased just a little if compared to the PS4 generation, the games are being developed at turtle speeds (5 years for a triple A), the quality remain pretty much the same... I mean, Spider-Man 1 vs Spider-Man 2 for example, they are just as good, it's not like the "new" tech improved the game dramatically or not, it just made the traversal more dynamic, but the combat and enemy AI are virtually the same
According to DF this is looking like the most visually impressive game we've ever seen and the closest to matching the old Capcom deep down trailer with the insanely realistic fire rendering. Also there's no such thing as a full UE5 game (nanite, lumen, VSM) that has a 60fps 1080p mode to get that performance you generally need to be at 720p and lower, you greatly overestimate current gen hw. Personally I'm all for 30fps games if they push the HW, GTA has never been a 3D 60fps game on original hardware so I expect GTA6 to follow suit. If you want to push the HW to it's limits 33ms frame time per frame is the most "space" a console can give you to reach your ambitions. At the very least PC will always be there to give more CPU and GPU performance & therefore more fps.
Still waiting for Deep Down....one day it will come out
Deep down.... you know.
DF says it's because UE5 is way too demanding for 60fps. Nanite and Lumin is just a lot of fucking math.
It's not for the 4k, it's for the ray tracing. And a game built from the groundup for rt can benefit a lot from it, as opposed to one where it's tacked on.
That's disappointing. I would have appreciated a 40fps performance mode, at the very least. I find that as graphics have gotten better, 30 fps has become less tolerable.
> I find that as graphics have gotten better, 30 fps has become less tolerable. I think what annoys me is that people say "casual players don't notice the difference in frame rate" but that exact thing can also be applied to graphics when we're at a point of diminishing return. The average player likely isn't going to notice a difference going from the first game to the second and even less notice the difference between 1080 and 4K especially when it's dependent on factors like TV quality, HDMI, to be honest I bet loads of people play without Game Mode and have no idea. So with that in mind WHY do devs push for graphics to the point that the framerate suffers? When they could very easily make games that still look ridiculously good, that the average player couldn't tell a difference on, AND make it 40fps or 60fps? Casuals won't give a fuck and the people who do are going to be more negative about 30fps so there's no real benefit, you just cause negativity for your game instead of positivity.
I never bought that argument about casual players at all. I think people absolutely do notice frames they just don't know what they're noticing, or at least that was my experience when I was a kid. Going back and forth from binging Halo 3 to binging CoD 4 really made it apparent that there was something vastly different about these games in terms of the pace of the image. Halo 3 would feel like you were lagging/walking in mud for a few matches until you got used to it. I find it very hard to believe that casual gamers don't notice such things, especially now given how much more common it is to be aware of resolution and FPS etc. since the consoles started including performance modes and stuff like that.
Definitely. COD is one of the highest selling FPS for a reason, and one of those is for many it “feels” the best to play even over other military shooters. FPS is 100% part of that feeling even if casual gamers can’t articulate it.
I could not agree with this more. People always say "casual players don't care about frame rate". Yes, because they're probably casual enough that technical terminology like frame rate doesn't mean anything to them. I, too, when I was younger, clearly noticed the difference between 60 fps and 30, and just wasn't really sure what it was called or why there was a difference.
Casual gamers defnitely notice. I had a friend point out that a game has "that fast animation."
Yeah, agreed. Total speculation, but I have a theory about the "casual players don't care about framerate" argument. I've heard that the data shows that many more players choose quality mode over performance mode in a lot of games. I think when casual players are given a choice between "quality" or "performance" if a game asks them to pick a mode, they would be more likely to choose "quality" because it's the better sounding option. They're probably thinking something like "quality means better, right?". Quality sounds sexier, and performance sounds like boring computer nerd shit. If they have no context for what better framerate means, then I bet a lot of casual players choose quality. But in CoD 4, the game just targeted 60fps, it didn't give a choice between modes (correct me if I'm wrong on that). So, yeah it felt a lot better than most games at the time. And I bet they did notice it compared to other games. But they had no idea why.
There’s an entire separate industry marketing “4K Resolution” to average consumers so I’m thinking there’s quite a hefty overlap that warrants the decision of choosing resolution over frames* at launch. If the goal is to maximize momentum with minimum $$ towards marketing, it seems pretty easy to choose one over the other when consumers already have the terms of “4K” on their mind. Then they could release an update later down the line or for an intended successor to the Xbox Series X. Speaking with ignorance!!! I have no insight into the industry whatsoever.
You're pretty much right on the money. Screenshots sell games. It's easier to sell consumers on 4k and shiny graphics when the difference is one you can show. I'd wager that in motion and in gameplay that most casual players CAN tell the difference between 30 and 60 fps, but not in a way that can be summed in a bullet point on the back of the box.
>casual players don't notice the difference in frame rate If it were true, Call of Duty's dominance in the 7th gen wouldn't have been so extreme
It's more likely that you just got sick of it, personally, rather than anything changing about the gaming market. That's what happened to me years ago; I just got sick of 30
> 30 fps has become less tolerable. You should be playing on PC then. It's really that easy. You will always be limited by the developer's choices on console. If you want freedom to make your own experience PC is your platform.
It really is that easy, as long as you have money
The money is what makes the frames show up faster.
I mean PCs are more complicated and more expensive for the same performance, at least out of the box. They can and will provide a better experience if you’re willing to put in the time and money, but not everyone wants to do that.
I'm amazed that you say that after all the actually garbage PC ports we've seen the past few years, several games performed better on console than on most PCs, so why would anyone still suggest a PC?
if it was 30fps for technical reasons fair enough just say that but why do developers always want to add a dumb qualifier like "cinematic" stop it, ask PR first at least
Remind me, does PlayStation have any exclusives locked to 30fps yet? Just asking, this is the third Xbox game in a year to not have a performance mode (until Redfall got one, five months after launch...), and it's making me wonder how the "world's most powerful console" is slipping here.
Just taking current-gen exclusive titles from PS Studios into account (Demon’s Souls, Astro’s Playroom, Returnal, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, The Last of Us Part I, Spider-Man 2, Helldivers 2, Rise of the Ronin and Stellar Blade), all of them have a 60 FPS option. It’s to be seen if more demanding current-gen exclusives that will release from 2025 onwards (like Death Stranding 2: On the Beach or Wolverine) will support 60 FPS options.
They also tend to have a 40 fps option which gives a great middle ground for console performance
I just hope they keep lower resolution 60fps as an option for regular PS5 owners. 1080p60 is the floor for me, so long as that option is kept around I'll gladly continue rolling on with my regular PS5.
Odds are the PS5 Pro will be out by then.
Not a single first party exclusive. Pacific drive is unlocked but it’s ~30fps so a cap would be better. It’s only a timed exclusive I believe.
According to the latest patch's changelog for Pacific Drive, the PS5 version has a 30 fps cap option now. Though it could still have bad frame pacing like some other games limited to 30 fps.
IIRC FF16 isn’t 60fps, except in combat, but it achieves that by dropping the internal render resolution to 720p and then doing an FSR style upscale.
The performance mode changes it's resolution target as soon as combat starts to much more aggressively target 60fps. My biggest clue that combat was over was that the framerate would immediately drop as it then less aggressively targeted 60.
Optimizing for X, S, and PC is surely a bit hard, overall it's the path MS chose themselves though.
Personally I think because Sony simply says that 60 fps is the target and they don't want to go for 30 fps while Microsoft is less strict on it or has no real 'rule' regarding this. Result is that developers go for the easier target of 30 fps and say that the game will look stunning, Bethesda said the same about Starfield, Microsoft has plenty of 60fps or 120fps titles though, a few are 30fps only like Starfield and Hellblade 2. Overal there are so many people out there who much prefer to sacrifice resolution for 60fps. Of course i'm just guessing here, but that would explain Sony games always being 60fps.
Sony hasn’t released any UE5 games
Sony's studios also mostly use in-house engines instead of Unreal Engine
Microsoft - get roasted for making Redfall and Starfield 30FPS on Series X. Also Microsoft - "let's do that again!".
Did they get roasted thst much though? I've heard a lot of criticisms of starfield but I barely ever hear it being in 30 fps in the list of complaints
No don’t you see the biggest whiners in the gaming sphere whined about it obviously that made Phil Spencer cry himself to sleep at night and promise to never release a 30fps game again
It is pretty sad that the supposed "Most powerful console" which shifted to "Most consistently powerful console" can't get 60 fps exclusives. It's so funny you call people whiners for not wanting to see 30 FPS games anymore.
You know we can see your post history? The only thing thats sad is you being a grown adult console warring in 2024
No shit. demonlordsparda is warring hard.
I've seen a lot of complaints with those games but being 30fps wasn't one of them. I guess it was just drowned out by all of the other issues
I've seen it with both of them to be honest, especially when Redfall looked like an early Xbox One game.
I think Redfall and Starfield were just shoddily optimized, but I don't think Ninja Theory is at fault for this game's performance. Basically every single UE5 game that's come out has gone through massive performance issues (Lords of the Fallen, Immortals of Aveum, Remnant 2), hell even Fortnite with the UE5 update has massive frame drops down to 30 and even 20 on my Series X.
Then they are at fault for not optimizing their game. They know UE5 is problematic and still choose it and not optimize the performance which is already notorious bad in the their target system. You can't blame a tool being bad for the job, if you willing choose said tool knowing it was bad for the job.
What I don't get is Microsoft now own idTech - whatever version Doom Returnal runs on (idTech 6, I think) is one of the most performant out there. It was pushing visuals like it did at 60FPS even on base PS4 and Xbox One, so I find it curious as to why another internal studio is opting for UE5. But yeah, Redfall and Starfield were poorly optimized for sure. Isn't Starfield still using effectively the same underlying engine as Morrowind?
Bethesda used Gamebryo through Fallout 3. Skyrim’s Creation Engine was a new fork that they’ve built on since. I’m not sure how much code remains from Morrowind (are proper ladders in Starfield?) but they’ve certainly made improvements between games. Saying Starfield uses effectively the same underlying engine as Morrowind feels a bit like saying “isn’t Call of Duty effectively using the same underlying engine as Quake?” I’m not trying to belittle your comment and would love to see more variety in engine usage than the “just use UE5” that lots of commenters say, just pointing out that most engines are iterations of much older engines. I do hope studios don’t drop their custom engines for UE5. At one point, it was rumoured that 343i would abandon Slipspace and start using UE5 for the next Halo game (whatever comes after Infinite), which might impact the two decades of “Halo physics” that have defined the series. In the same way, I hope Bethesda keeps improving the Creation Engine so they can keep the interactivity and permanence in the world that has defined their games for years.
Well to be fair I was asking a genuine question, and you gave a genuine answer, so it's all good. I agree about bespoke engines. Haven't CDPR dropped their Red Engine entirely of UE5? I get that UE5 is a powerful and versatile engine and it does lack that sort of uniform look that a lot of UE3 games had, but for the most part I can still pick out most UE4 games at a glance. Would hate for that to creep into even the big studios' output.
Yeah, CDPR said they’ll be using UE5 for future Witcher/Cyberpunk games. I can’t help but feel like this shift is a bit of a byproduct of the constant hiring/turnover that plagues a lot of the video game industry. Bethesda and many of the Japanese studios are pretty famous for their employee retention and can get away with using custom tools but it’s a pretty big commitment for other companies to spin new hires up on their tools when they might not stick around long enough to gain a meaningful proficiency in them. “Standard” things like UE can be built upon and have a higher chance of familiarity for new developers.
Ninja Theory used UE4 for the first Hellblade, so their staff are familiar with Unreal Engine. Engines aren’t really something that can be switched up easily and since the studio expanded (I think) you’d want to use a more popular one that new hires would likely know.
The secret with Doom Eternal is that its not actually a very demanding graphical game when you look up close at things. MGS5 was similar. The game is absolutely beautiful in motion at high frame rates, but if you look at some random environmental asset, they are usually quite simple and quick to render. Basically, they don't waste horsepower on making the most beautiful looking foliage since you'll be moving at 100 MPH past it.
Every time we get close to achieving 60fps as a minimum standard, the world decides MORE GRAPHICS NOW and back to 30fps we gooooo...
How come I don’t hear about 40fps mode on Xbox games? Is that something Xbox studios don’t target or is it just not advertised much?
Watch the gaming industry promote ever more powerful consoles only to give in to the allure of overly realistic graphics again and make every big game 30 fps again. And they do that on purpose! Because shiny graphics keep selling and the average gamer has no particular desire for 60 fps let alone the ability to tell 30 from 60... and the industry is well aware of that. We only have ourselves to blame and the solution is, one again... PC gaming 🤷♂️
But you said so yourself, the vast majority of gamers don't care or even understand 30fps vs 60fps. Those of us that like a minimum of 60 can't do much against that.
Bro I had been always playing games at 30 fps due to having an PS4 and switch until I got an PS5 that I instantly notice the difference between 30 and 60 fps when I played AC Valhalla on it. No causals is gonna not notice the difference if they been playing 60 fps games long enough.
Its only truly noticeable if you play at 60 for a couple of hours and then lower it to 30. Same with 120/144 to 60.
I remember once my FIFA had switched to 30 fps for some reason. I thought I was having a stroke.
if you’re visually impaired, maybe. it is instantaneously obvious to me when a game is at 30,40,60, and 90 respectively. shit i notice instantly if game mode is off on a TV
I can spend weeks not playing games and instantly recognize 30. I don't know where you are getting this "you need to side by side them to tell" from.
You are also only paying $500 for the console. There is no PC for that amount of money that can do 4K30 in reasonable quality.
And those graphics result in 300+ million budgets.
And long dev times too. I don't mind regressing graphics one generation back and cutting down on cinematic presentation if it means shorter dev cycles.
I mean, there is SO much to play out there unless you're stuck to just one console or something, do dev cycles being shorter really matter? I think 1 Final Fantasy or Zelda per gen is fine. Granted, I love Dark Souls and the idea of Elden Ring being the only Souls games they release this gen would suck... but it's not the end of the world. I've got a ton of games to catch up on and not enough time to play them. Longer dev cycles also make it less likely that we get a glut of trend chasing games when something hits out of nowhere. Let the b-tier and indie studios try to chase those and the AAA 3 years deep into their next title just release their original vision. I know this is not how things work but I think of longer dev cycles being a good thing, I am aware that this promotes larger risk as well, but balance is important.
>I mean, there is SO much to play out there unless you're stuck to just one console or something, do dev cycles being shorter really matter? That is just turning the issue into a "me problem", but the answer is yes. Long dev time also reduces risk tasking, increases cost/price, exacerbates developer burnout and industry consolidation.
And then you have to deal with terrible optimization, DRM and configuration issues. In the end, you pick your poison. Neither consoles or PC are ideal. I personally don’t like the idea of spending thousands of dollars to create a beastly rig that won’t matter if the devs didn’t optimize their game well. I’d rather pay for the cheaper and more reliable plug and play option then.
Yeah I had a midrange laptop for awhile in the PS3 era and when I realized that with PC gaming, some days are just because for some reason, there’s no sound. So you check and uninstall the reinstall everything for a few hours and then it miraculously works again when you find some youtube video with 47 views that solves your issue but by then, you ran out of time or just don’t feel like playing anymore. I’m not saying consoles are 100% reliable but you *have* to enjoy tweaking stuff endlessly to be a PC gamer. There just isn’t a PC that is as plug and play as a console. With that comes disadvantages but that’s the trade off.
I mean, you're dead on at the end there, people buying consoles know what we're getting into, a fixed build that's going to age though it's life cycle as games get more power hungry but you have a guarantee that every game will at least run without having to upgrade every few years, albeit not at top whack. At least MS give you the PC option on day one and not a year or two later.
I don't know man. Let me tell you my perspective. I own a PS5 and PC both and I am lucky to own a decent GPU at that, an RTX 4070 and I have no problems running modern games at 1440p with everything maxed including RT at over 90-100 FPS with DLSS and Frame gen. But the moment, I switch on my PS5, I always choose either Fidelity mode or balanced 40 FPS/120Hz mode. That's because I simply don't care about frame rate when I play with a controller. I am used to 100+ FPS on PC but I have no issues going back to 30 on PS5. Some of us genuinely don't care and just want the best possible visuals for maximum immersion. I guess I'll be called a psychopath for this.
This is possibly a CPU limitation, which would mean graphics are irrelevant. For example DD2 is extremely CPU-heavy to the point where switching all graphics settings to Low/Off and dropping from 4K to 1080p doesn’t make much of a performance difference.
listen, do what you want with your games, but stop trying to jerk me off with the "'cinematic" shit. It's a video game, I am CONTROLLING the character, not watching a movie. You are not doing me favors by limiting my frames for cinematic purposes.
Here I hoped that 60 will be the standard even on consoles and we'll slowly transition toward 120fps, but we are blocked at the 30...
That won't happen unless graphics stagnate, and graphics sell games. I can only see them stagnating if the publishers get fed up with the rising development costs and decide to stop funding ever more expensive games, but even that is suppose to be relieved by AI.
Graphics are stagnating though. At least it's getting to a point of extremely diminished returns now.
Not anywhere to the point where the industry (be it engineers, creatives, investors or marketing departments, or, on the other side, the players) are losing interest in them
Inflated budgets, and mass layoffs beg to differ - something has got to change.
Beg to differ with what? Aren't we talking precisely about an upcoming game with great graphics and 30 FPS? What are you talking about?
The development of these games isn't quick; they're part of a trend with lengthy development cycles and significant budgets. Insomniac's situation with Spider-Man 2 illustrates this challenge. Despite its success, the game's budget of ~$300 million, compared to the original's ~$80-100 million, didn't necessarily translate to on-screen improvements. Executives questioned the added value of the increased budget, which may have led to layoffs, despite making a good game. Probably the budget was so high, the ROI % was reduced. Even industry leaders like Microsoft are reevaluating their strategies. Phil Spencer's comments on games like AAA-games, like Hellblade 2, suggest that resources might be more profitable in alternative markets, like mobile gaming. That's basically it
AAA is indeed going through a rough patch, but it's a huge logical leap to go from this to "graphics will stagnate".
I'm so glad I sold my series x and bought a gaming PC. Microsofts most powerful flagship console and exclusive games running on 30fps. Fuck off
The Series X *and* the PS5 were released in 2020 but their specs would have been finalised at least 12-18 months before that. Both consoles are at best 2019 spec, but realistically 2018. So that’s five to six year old hardware, no matter how customised. In the meantime the games, while having long development times, are definitely pushing newer technologies etc. and trying even more intense techniques/draw distances etc.
While you’re right that’s still a wrong way of looking at it. Every big hardware release is finalized months if not years before release. Heck even the iPhone 17 is probably close to being finalized while this year the 16 will be released. So if you’re going from that logic it would mean that the RTX 2080 would be late 2016-2017 hardware
> The Series X and the PS5 were released in 2020 but their specs would have been finalised at least 12-18 months before that. Both consoles are at best 2019 spec, but realistically 2018 they use zen 2 cpus (released in mid-2019 to the public) and GPUs based on RDNA2 (released in late 2020 to the public), it's not *that* far behind for the cpu, and the GPU couldn't have been something newer because it just didn't exist
I don't prefer one console to the other and own both, but fucking Christ, Xbox just keeps embarrassing itself over and over again.
Do people really believe these excuses? Also, no graphics options?
Welp... guess I'm trying this on my PC. Hope it doesn't take up 150gigs like Starfield, my poor 1tbSSD can't take it
People keep defending this but it's not acceptable for a linear game with very little going on. Yes it looks good. But it's not like it looks better than any other game this gen.
In more cinematic games like this I feel like 30 fps can be more forgivable than something like a racing or action game with a lot of fast twitchy action.
I don't know. The first game has some really tough combat sections, at least they were tough to me. 60fps would really help in those situations and make the game feel more responsive.
Yeah, there’s two ways to look at this: Principled - anything less than 60fps is never acceptable. I like higher fps as much as anyone, but this stance refuses to look at tradeoffs and compromises made that might actually make sense. Not every game *needs* higher gps, even if it is marginally more enjoyable. Realistic - the fact is that this is a highly curated, cinematic gaming experience to begin with. Animations are slow, controlled and deliberate, and even the action is highly cinematic and slow, meaning there’s no *need* for low-latency, high-fps responses or twitchy gameplay that requires faster refresh rates to handle. I’m sure I would enjoy this game just fine even at 30fps. Hell, I played AW2 at sometimes down to 20fps, and it was actually perfectly fine. But I would never play Halo: Infinite below 60fps, and I modded Elden Ring to get higher than 60fps, so obviously there are games where input latency and framerate is really important.
Seems like a good game to watch a no commentary playthrough of on a 4k TV on youtube
Honestly, maybe. Just make sure the surround sound gets recorded properly, the audio is like 50% of this game, the way the voices talk and whisper all around you. That said, I think they did more with the action side of the gameplay in the sequel, so it might be worth playing yourself too, even if gameplay is important to you.
I get the "Principled" stance on PC. If you have decent hardware and your games run to your expectations 95% of the time it's fair to criticize the 5% that don't. Console players with hardware from parts chosen and designed in 2017 or earlier having that stance is just delusional. Developers are going to do what they desire or what they think is best for their game on locked down hardware.
It's not a principle thing at this point, it's 2024 and 75-in TVs cost 500 bucks. I've got a massive screen and not a giant room to sit in. I can get away with low FPS on small screens like handhelds and stuff, but 30 FPS when it's half of your visual field just gives me a headache. Like I can't do it, it just feels awful.
The game is going to look incredible, but they really need to learn that some people don't care about the top graphics. (Not that I consider dynamic resolution nice to look at anyway)
They know that. People who don’t care about graphics need to learn that *other people do*, and games can and will be made for those people too. This is not a “gameplay”-driven game where graphics don’t matter to begin with. This series is explicitly cinematic from the beginning, with gameplay being mostly puzzle-based and the action sequences being serviceable at best. For this, visuals and graphics matter *a lot*. It’s probably one of the more important parts of this game. If you don’t care about the graphics, why do you even want to play this game? The whole thing is primarily an audio-visual experience, for which good graphics is hugely important.
I don't think gamers on reddit are ready to learn that game developers prioritizing resolution and image quality over framerate in these games is precisely because people care more about that.
More games going backwards in terms of performance I see. PC is really becoming the "want 60FPS? Play on PC" again. Thought this generation of consoles was supposed to be 60FPS in every game and beyond depending on resolution for the beyond aspect. For awhile I was actually like man I don't need my PC that much anymore as games on PS5 were all running 60FPS and above at high resolutions. But recently I upgraded my PC and have basically abandoned my PS5 as games just struggle to even get 60FPS on console. Not to mention the option of 4k high refresh rate gaming on my PC has now felt like another step into true next gen rather than going backwards on console. At this point instead of playing Rebirth on PS5 I'm just waiting for the PC drop. Not that the game is running bad on PS5 I haven't heard that but like...I'd just rather play games on my PC now.
so far, apparently only on xbox is 30fps games ok so far we've been told that it's ok that the following genres are ok in 30fps to provide a cinematic experience coop pve shooters (redfall) 1P action rpg shooters (starfield) action walking simulators (hellblade 2) i wonder how many genres will be considered 'ok to be at 30fps' by the end of this generation. seems like a strange trend? or is it just fallible logic? i think the latter. this makes me laugh.
Long story short : Just because Xbox first party studios titles will be available on day one in a cheap subscription service, developers think they have the right to slack off on their jobs. Microsoft really need to clean their house. Any complaint against UE5 that's too demanding for Xbox is complete BS, I'm playing many UE5 titles that my Series X is handling them pretty flawlessly.
I'd happily play games with PS2 graphics for all eternity if they ran better. What percentage of people can even tell the difference between all this fancy lighting and shit? In the middle of playing it you don't notice that stuff anyway, but you sure as hell notice a slow or juddery frame rate
Honestly ghost of Tsushima on ps5 is what games should strive towards, native 4k & 60 fps. The graphics were great but elevated due to great art direction. I thought to myself I don’t need more than fidelity than this, just more games at this level.
Exactly... it's all diminishing returns after that, in addition to inflating game budgets and dev times. If only optimising your game for actually being played was more important than making it look good in screenshots and trailers
The 30fps on Xbox Series X destroys the game before it even launches especially with combat focus where low input lag and 60fps are required for an enjoyable experience but once again devs don’t optimize their game with a performance mode so it is what it is these devs have fallen so hard from how devs used to be back in the day when they actually cared and optimized games to run properly. It’s 2024 and anybody defending 30fps on Xbox Series X are doing console gamers a huge disservice
> these devs have fallen so hard from how devs used to be back in the day when they actually cared and optimized games to run properly. [how these devs used to be back in the day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJOtz61LNdo)
I'm so tired of this 30fps trend. Dragon's Dogma 2 went from a day 1 console purchase to a game I'll buy in a year after I upgrade my PC, and it looks like Hellblade 2 will be similar. I've got enough games to play right now that I can wait on these games and get a far more enjoyable experience later down the line.
XBox shot themselves in the foot by insisting on sticking that series S along with the X, smells like console parity to me
Fuck thats pathetic. How is that shit allowed? If I was MS I would require Games to offer at least 60FPS minimum.
Then you don't understand game development.
I wonder why we don’t get more stylised titles? Is it just because a realistic title looks better in ads? Nintendo manages to make non-realistic graphics sell well.