Jump to content

How much does framerate matter?


Karooo

Recommended Posts

Recently we've been asking ourselves some hard questions:

 

•What is it that we want to focus on?spacer.gif

 

•What's most important to us?spacer.gif

 

•What do we want to make?spacer.gif

 

And the answer is simple: We want to give you guys, our fans and players, the best looking games you can buy on a console.

You may have already seen Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time (available in US stores now!)

 

rc_acit_screen_08_sm.jpg

 

I'm really proud of what our art and production teams accomplished in this game. It's a great looking game, a ton of fun to play and is 60fps. And it's that last point that I want to talk about today. One of the long-standing sacred cows here at Insomniac is framerate. We've long viewed a solid framerate as both a sign of a quality product and professionalism as developers. It's always been point of pride in our work and considered an extremely serious part of our development process. However, during development, there are hard choices to be made between higher quality graphics and framerate. And we want to make the right choices that reflect our commitment to providing you with the best looking games out there. To that end, our community team did some research into the question of framerate. The results perhaps confirmed what I've known for a long time, but found it difficult to accept without evidence.

 

They found that:

 

•A higher framerate does not significantly affect sales of a game.spacer.gif

 

•A higher framerate does not significantly affect the reviews of a game.spacer.gif

 

And in particular they found that there was a clear correlation between graphics scores in reviews (where they are provided) and the final scores. And they found no such correlation between framerate and the graphics scores nor the final scores. As an interesting side-note, our team also found no direct correlation between gameplay scores and final scores, however it does appear that gameplay scores are also influenced by graphics scores. i.e. Better looking games appear to be more "fun" to reviewers, in general.

graphics_sales.jpg

 

After reviewing our internal research, I decided to take this question to the public. I wanted to see what the players themselves thought of this question. Here are the results of that poll:

fps_poll.jpg

The first thing I noted in reviewing these results was that 16% of the respondents said they wouldn't buy a non 60fps game. Now, considering the top selling games and the market research, I take that to mean one of two things:

•People are big fat liars. Sales numbers clearly contradict this pattern. Or,spacer.gif

 

•The group responding to this poll in the first place was a self-selected group of people with an interest in framerate in the first place. Which may also explain why that last group is represented by such a small response rate in the poll results.spacer.gif

 

Based on the research, the informal polling and various conversations with fans and other game buyers, I've come to the following conclusions:

 

•Framerate is important, but not critically so. When there is a clear choice between framerate and improved graphics, graphics should win. The correlation with review scores is clear.

spacer.gif

 

•There is virtually no advantage in sales or reviews of a 60 fps game versus a 30 fps game.

spacer.gif

 

•Only a minority of players notice framerate as a significant issue of any kind.

spacer.gif

 

•Framerate should be as consistent as possible and should never interfere with the game. However, a drop in framerate is interestingly seen by some players as a reward for creating or forcing a complex setup in which a lot of things must happen on the screen at once. As in, "Damn! Did you see that? That was crazy!"

 

spacer.gif

•A solid framerate is still a sign of professional, well-made product. When there is a trade-off for framerate, it needs to be clearly worth it. i.e. It must introduce clear improvements on what the player sees, and never used as an excuse to not optimize the game or art.spacer.gif

 

What does all of this mean, really? It means that framerate is still important to us here at Insomniac, but it's not on the same pedestal it was before. And that Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time will probably be Insomniac's last 60fps game.

 

Mike.

 

Source

________________________

 

Fck you Edge and Eurogamer :furious:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So we have this gen's hardware's first problem: balancing a high framerate with great graphics!

 

I also noticed something a few days back: COD4 (when i played it on PC) looked as gritty (not that its not) as KZ2....and the only difference that came through to the casual eye was the framerate!!!

 

It sure is important.....but as they said....they have just proved their incapability to be a factor on the customer side :furious:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Adding to what dullu said...

well run fraps while you watching a movie on your pc .. it shows frame rate of 24 fps (as all movies are typically encoded at 24fps or 23.97 to be exact for PAL and 25 for ntsc). Infact you can not notice the difference between a 60 fps and 30 fps game just by looking at it , difference comes in response lag, and thats the only advantage of having 60fps where your key press gets registered in 1/60 th of a second instead of 1/30th.So yeah i would like to have better graphics instead of 60fps if i have to choose either of the two..

Link to comment
Share on other sites

well.. that sounded kinda.. like an excuse. what i take from this :

1. sales of rnc have been pretty dissapointing.

2. we did not make a better looking game cz we wanted 60 fps.

3. so u (the consumers) really found the graphics bad eh..??

Link to comment
Share on other sites

dunno.. im pretty framerate oblivious. cant notice slowdowns that much.

 

It's less about the slowdowns/lockdowns.....Its more about the fact how much better a good game with nice graphics look when the framerate is cranked up!

 

If framerate was not important, we could very well be playing kz2 on a M$ presentation :devil:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What I don't understand is that the human eye shouldn't be able to tell any difference beyond 30fps.... Then why is it that you all want 60fps steady?? As long as it doesn't lag isn't 30fps fine?? Considering that better graphics + 30 fps is the thing they're pitting against 60fps

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I want dynamic weather in GT5, f**k 60fps :rant:

a stable framerate is required in a game like GT5 it greatly improves the gameplay.

at 200 mhp even a single drop in frame rate( ...yeah 28-27....) might ruin the experience(.... not the race.....jut it wont be very smooth)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    No registered users viewing this page.

×
×
  • Create New...