Should '30 fps' lock on PC games exist? Some people think it should...

[Ascalaphus]

Here is the deal.
On PC keep the framerate unlocked. PC has the brute hardware to drive framerates higher. That is the truth. You can have something like what the Witcher 3 did: have locked 30 or 60 or unlimited. The point is don't release a game that is locked at ONLY 30 fps and immediately gimp those with the PC hardware who can actually run the game at over 60 fps. Give everybody an option. On console locking framerates makes sense because they are closed systems and can't be upgraded internally with more powerful hardware. On PC locking framerates to some sub 60 framerates is like driving on the Autobahn with a Ferrari and them restricting everybody to only 30mph. It will only anger people with faster cars.

What say you? Should 30fps even be an option on PC games? How do you feel about hard locking certain games to 30fps on PC?

 

[R-T-B]

Should 30fps even be an option on PC games?

Why not? Options are good.

The only thing that's bad is when you limit options, such as FORCING 30FPS.

 

[RejZoR]

What I hate the most is when devs are so lazy they can't make async physics engine and it has to run at same framerate as the graphics which they of course lock at 30 fps. Then, if you hack the game, everything gets fucked up. One such example is NFS Rivals. Locked at 30fps and if you forcibly unlock it to 100fps, the game basically becomes broken because physics start behaving all weird and bizarre. Or Bioshock 1 which had the same problem where physics actually ran at lower framerate than graphics. And if you unlocked it, objects moved smoothly, but they often started bouncing around totally out of control. This is LAZY programming and it should GO AWAY. There are many games where framerate can go as high as one can get and physics will still be perfectly fine.

 

[Guitar]

You should not be capped to any FPS, but be able to lock to an FPS of your choice if necessary (Even in specific increments such as 30, 60, 75, 120, etc.).

 

[qubit]

The game should allow the PC to lock at any framerate the user wants or let it freewheel if they want.

I don't understand why developers forever try to limit people's options for no good reason which is so annoying. This is true for any computer application, not just games.

 

[rtwjunkie]

One game immediately comes to mind, infuriatingly: L.A. Noire. the stupid game is locked to 30fps on PC. Yes, there are mods, but raising the framerate on this game has adverse affects.

So yeah, I prefer the option to limit my own framerates to what I want. thankfully, most games I play allow some form of this.

 

[qubit]

One game immediately comes to mind, infuriatingly: L.A. Noire. the stupid game is locked to 30fps on PC.

I was never interested in this game, but if I were, I'd boycott it for this alone. Example, I recently tried out a demo of Destiny on my PS4 Pro as it was on sale and a PS4 exclusive. Game seemed ok, but it was a fast first person shooter running at 30fps all the way which made movement look horrible, plus laggy as fuck. End result is I didn't buy it.

I regret buying RAGE on Steam because it's locked to 60fps, which I didn't know about before purchase. For this reason I've hardly played it so it was a waste of money. I literally have hundreds of other perfectly good games to play before I come back to this one and new games I'm interested in are released all the time, so I'm unlikely to ever come back to it.

This is what happens when pretentious devs like John Carmack cripple their products in idiotic ways. If there's another of his games in the future that I'm interested in I'm gonna check for this issue first thing.

 

[BiggieShady]

This is LAZY programming and it should GO AWAY. There are many games where frame rate can go as high as one can get and physics will still be perfectly fine.

Agreed, this horribleness happens when developers calculate physics on the rendering thread at each frame update, resulting in physics update rate that varies along with frame rate causing missed collisions and intersecting objects (that rapidly jump around constantly trying to resolve its current interlocked collision).
The proper way is using completely fixed rate physics calculation on a different thread, completely decoupled from rendering thread and independent of frame rate variations.
For example when rendering a fast moving object, even when frame rate is as low as 1 fps - physics engine will still calculate 60 position updates between two frames and detect collisions properly inside that second.
I'm not sure what happens if the fps is too high, probably time step gets too small and floating point precision issue rear its ugly head.

 

[ZoneDymo]

im sorry but this is just not a simple universal statement to make.

Take Dark Souls, you can break the 30fps cap but then the game becomes wonky, hard to play, hit boxes fail etc.
It was made for 30 fps and honestly that works just fine on it.

Star Wars The Force Unleashed, also 30 fps cap and really no trouble because of it.

Now take Prey, Doom 3 engine game, capped at 60fps and I have annoying stutters I have yet to be able to get rid off making that game for me atm effectively unplayable.

Sure 60fps is nice but it really depends on the game and how its made, not all movies work on the same frame rate either and I have never heard someone complain about that.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I've been on Steam for damn near a decade and I have yet to look at a curators list. I don't think this carries any weight. That said, 30 fps lock is fine for some games (saw Cook, Serve, Delicious in the video). Other games, 30 fps is not fine (anything fast paced). For example, I saw Split|Second on that list: that's a game I installed a long time ago and never finished. Coincidence? I remember the blur effect on that game pissing me off. If half of that blur is coming from the shitty framerate cap, it explains why I quickly got disgusted with the game.

It depends on the game. That said, I don't think there should be a hard cap at 60 fps either unless your monitor is 60 Hz and you have vsync on. I like vsync because what's the point of 180 fps on a 60 Hz monitor (observed in Payday 2)?

 

[Papahyooie]

Bottom line... give us the options. I'm one of those that if I know a game is locked at 30fps, I simply refuse to buy it. Of course I make calculated exceptions when warranted, such as The Stick of Truth, or games that contain little action. Obviously I don't care if Undertale is 60fps... But a shooter? I would never buy a 30fps shooter, or action game. I can't even play xbox 360 titles anymore because they seem so choppy to me. I even have a hard time watching TV sometimes, even with its motion blurring.

Point is, there is absolutely no reason to arbitrarily lock fps (except in the rare case of "stylistic decisions") If you as a dev want to shoot for 30fps as your performance target, that's fine. But do not force those with the brute hardware strength from reaching higher. The only reason given in the video is "60 fps is hard for devs to do." Then don't do it... Let the frames fly freely with the option to turn on vsync. There is no proper reason to lock games at any framerate really. Not forcibly so, anyway.

 

[Steevo]

Yep, totally depends on the game. CIV and other games like it? I could care less if it were 30 or 60FPS as long as they make sure the animation is smooth. FPS games need to be at least 60 and have the ability to go higher as refresh rates do. That being said, I would guess only 1 out of 20 people, if you sat them down at a system with a unknown monitor and had the frame rate at 60 VS 75 or 120 would be able to tell any real difference.

 

[Silas Woodruff]

It's probably the same people that think the human eye is limited to 30 or 60fps.
There is absolutely nothing that limits "the frames" your eyes see, as a side note, your eyes don't see in frames and motion blur is a thing that gets added when your eyes can't process the information fast enough.

 

[SaltyFish]

Sorry to break to circlejerk here but amusingly, some games have the opposite problem.

The Sims 3 along with Might and Magic X are not very demanding games. Yet they are not capped so your 750 USD graphics card will get hot rendering crazy number of frames (say, ~300 fps) despite the games internally not going at a higher rate (say, 30 or 60 fps). The games have fixes for them in various ways, but the problem exists that devs are lazy. An frame rate lock or not doesn't affect most people (sane devs don't expect players to have upper end GPUs), but it does affect people here who have massive amounts of disposable income to spend on hardware that can render at several multiples of the intended frame rate (with all the other eye candy maxed out no less).

Beyond that, I suppose, the question is... how integral is super high frame rate to a game? It might not matter in 2D games (where sprite animation is a concern) or turn-based games. But does it matter as much as people say in 3D twitch-based games (which AAA games seem to focus almost exclusively on nowadays) after some level (30, 50, 60, whatever)? From the comments here, I wonder how of us go back to the original Quake nowadays.

 

[swirl09]

An frame rate lock or not doesn't affect most people (sane devs don't expect players to have upper end GPUs), but it does affect people here who have massive amounts of disposable income to spend on hardware that can render at several multiples of the intended frame rate (with all the other eye candy maxed out no less).

And what about in 5 minutes when a $99 GPU beats the crap out of the top tier that was for sale at the time of a titles release?

I get a real laugh when I read an upcoming title listing "features" should as no FPS cap and the ability to do res (obviously they dont phrase it like that, but thats how I read it!!).

 

[erocker]

Yes it should exist because according to the guy in the video... "Sentiment"?! What? I think that's as far as I want to contribute to this lethargic topic.

 

[Papahyooie]

Yep, totally depends on the game. CIV and other games like it? I could care less if it were 30 or 60FPS as long as they make sure the animation is smooth. FPS games need to be at least 60 and have the ability to go higher as refresh rates do. That being said, I would guess only 1 out of 20 people, if you sat them down at a system with a unknown monitor and had the frame rate at 60 VS 75 or 120 would be able to tell any real difference.

Indeed, I've found that I can't tell a difference past around 80-90 fps on a 120hz monitor and playing a shooter. But I sure as hell can tell the difference between 60 and 30. 30fps is like a slideshow to me during action sequences.

 

[cdawall]

I'm sorry bottom line if the game is coded so that exceeding a framerate damages performance and actions in a game the coders should be on the chopping block. Animated actions shouldn't be biased from frame rate...

 

[eidairaman1]

Forced caps shouldn't be allowed but player choice caps should be allowed, or no cap at all.

 

[Evo85]

I wouldn't buy a game that "locked" me at 30 fps. Period.

Fps=life!

 

[alucasa]

All PC gamers care about is fps or so it has been said.

 

[FYFI13]

Most definitely yes. Also, we should cover half of the sun, blow up all bridges by half and sleep 4 hours instead of 8. Just because of sentiment.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

The only reason the 30 FPS lock started getting used in the first place is because with consoles having mediocre power, especially toward the end of their long life cycle, devs had to cap some games at 30 FPS just so they could run on their systems. Of course since then they've done other things, like drop res on some console titles.

It was either that, or stagnating the technology used in games. The only real foul play occurs when certain dev teams do a crap, lazy PC port and leave it locked to 30 FPS as well. Hopefully since MS announced a claimed end to console life cycles, this trend will eventually fade away.

Then again, I'm sure many of us thought this so called "next gen" console cycle with most games at 1080p would do a lot for PC gaming, and if anything it's been the reverse of that. Let's just hope we don't see the same thing happen when Scorpio releases.

 

[newtekie1]

My opinion is let the game run free. If the user wants to limit the frame rate, they can using the tools provided by their graphics card.

 

[TheMailMan78]

I don't care what some people think. I only care about what I think.