![]() Progress in the gaming industry has happened fast. I don't suppose Star Trek quotes make regular appearances on VICE, but this one feels appropriate, from 1991's sixth motion picture: "Let us redefine progress to mean that just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily mean that we should do that thing." A fluctuating frame rate can be a right ball ache. I don't know about you, but I translate that as Uncharted series developers Naughty Dog caring more about their game being a quality, reliable, smooth, and consistent experience over one that runs at a frame rate that might be achievable, but at the risk of compromising the player's enjoyment. That gameplay footage was running at 30fps, leading Eurogamer's writer to note: "By conceding to a 30fps lock, the team is at least able to go all out with this set-piece a preference compared to a theoretical 60fps that just can't be sustained." Take the forthcoming Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, due out on PS4 in March 2016 and shown off at this summer's E3 conference. Look at the coverage Eurogamer's Digital Foundry provides, and you'll soon enough see that it's not the number of frames per second that matters, but how fixed the frame rate actually is. Gamers demanding that 60fps should be "industry standard" don't see that the chase for such a uniform achievement is damaging to the entire gaming experience. If I like the game, I like the game, and whatever its frame rate might be becomes a tertiary concern at best. ![]() And even those that might stutter a little because the ambition is too great for the architecture, it's not like I get pissed when I'm playing them. But, and here's a shock, not all games need or even require that frame rate. When a game works at 60fps it is pretty special, and such smoothness definitely has its place in the competitive multiplayer space, in racing games, space simulators or any kind of artistic concept game (think Journey or Flower) so long as it's fixed and constant. What this means is that big, cross-platform games are often made with a focus on the lucrative console market-we saw it with Grand Theft Auto V, where the PC release trailed long behind versions for current- and past-gen consoles, and just recently with Batman: Arkham Knight, which was so bad on PC that publisher Warner Bros. A $3,100 gaming PC is sure to exert more grunt than a laptop costing a fraction of that sum. The perk of console development is that everyone who owns a PS4 has the same fixed-spec machine beneath their TV-which puts PC gamers at a slight loss when it comes to studios "guaranteeing" performance quality, as set-ups are subject to personal tastes (and budgets). Playing The Evil Within straight out of the box was atrocious, but its day one patch sorted it out, although problems persisted on the Xbox One version. But the reality is that a lot of today's console games simply cannot run that fast, which has led to an abundance of post-release patches and fixes. Fans of eSports-friendly titles, and first-person shooters, need their games running as responsively as possible, and demand that developers meet their frame rate predictions, even when the end results are far from promised. The Last of Us, for example, pushed the processing power of the PS3 to its absolute limit, and was locked at 30fps. ![]() And yet, taking this perspective leaves one blinkered to the realities of the not-yet-behind-us previous console generation, and how hard it was to get some games running at 30fps, let alone anything more. PC games, when appropriately optimized, have been able to nail a consistent 60 frames per second for years now, and the general thinking when it comes to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 is that these new consoles should be able to match that performance. Did it make the game unplayable? Did it hell. Its exceptional array of cars, setups, and graphics were astounding for the time, but everything was running at a phenomenal 10fps, a fact I've never even thought to check until writing this. Back in the mid-1990s, one of my favorite games was Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix II, a Formula One racing sim highly regarded as one of the best ever in its genre. It took me the best part of half a day to complete the final level of BioShock Infinite on its hard difficulty because the amount of entities and effects going on was too much for my poor old Xbox 360 to handle, and so the frame rate suffered.
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