Topic: The framerate hill I'm willing to die on.

I can't wrap my head around why some people think sub 60 fps is adequate. How can someone look at this and think it's ok. Too many otherwise decent games are plagued by this; luigis mansion 3, all the latest pokemon, animal crossing to name a few.

This is a still frame of a 30fps game.

This is what that looks like in motion to the human eye.

This is what Skyrim looks like at 30fps

@Ironcore Primarily because people have different vision and different sensitivity to frame rate. That image that you state is "in motion" isn't what I perceived when playing the demo. The image you posted immediately made my eye hurt similar to the 3ds functionality. I had absolutely no discomfort playing the demo. Since video games are so reliant on how an individual perceives and processes visual stimuli it makes sense that what one person may find acceptable another may not. Also there is post processing that happens with an individual's TV.

It's not really a big deal to many. If it had been, I suspect gaming wouldn't have gotten as far as it had given many games in the history of gaming are variable.

@Ryu_Niiyama I see this come up a lot, in regards to older games running at lower frame rates. I have just recently been down a rabbit hole for the last 3 months into crt gaming and 30fps on display which supports interlacing is not as bad plus most games back in the day would either be running at 50 or 60fps plus the smoothness of interlacing.

I've also heard people say they are fine with the doubling/ghosting online but in person I am yet so see someone look at this and say thats ok for them. I have done probably too much testing on different displays and consoles on this issue and at 30fps on an LCD display it always looks horrendous.

I would love to look at the same display as you, in person and see what your reaction is.

I'm sure you would agree though that the demo of this game or the games I listed would really benefit from running a higher framerate?

No it doesn't?

@Dogorilla I would love to set up an experiment, run a game at 30, 60 and 120 fps and run some text across the screen. I want to see if you could make out the text at 30fps.

I have somewhat run tests like this in person multiple times and on different displays and so far everyone I have tested says that 30fs look like this. Yes my sample size was small but they all reported the exact same thing without prompt.

@Ironcore The static image to represent movement you posted isn’t going to have the same effect as playing the game directly.

I replayed the demo to see if I was missing something both with and without my glasses and aside from the discomfort being nearsighted has on me playing without my glasses the game seemed fine. As such that means that while technically the game may benefit from a higher frame rate I won’t benefit from it personally as I won’t really notice the difference. I also have a bit of a limit that uncapped games that are above 70fps or so (not sure the precise cut off) make me nauseous/slightly dizzy. But I attribute that to my lack of depth perception.

I don’t think the display would matter as much simply because I don’t have stereoscopic vision. And sadly at this point I am too old to remember the perception difference. I suppose that makes me an outlier for your argument but people have all sorts of vision differences so I think I can still weigh in. Especially since I have been able to play games this way for 30 years. That being said I use a LCD an OLED with no post processing although my switch uses an mClassic.

PS5 and XSX still run many games at 30fps, so it's whatever.

So unless we're talking about PC or nothing, I think most folks would be content with something, rather than PC or nothing.

@Ryu_Niiyama Thanks for trying it out. I too use the MClassic, huge fan.

If you could run it one more time please, run left to right (or right to left) and see if you can still make out the wording by the NPCs in the same clarity as you could standing still.

@Magician Thats a good point, graphics and aspect ratio are being prioritised over fidelity.
I would always chose the best graphics possible at an acceptable framerate rather than the best graphics possible framerates be dammed.

I have a PS5, exclusively for gran turismo and a pc for some random steam and indie games which are not out yet on switch and I own no 30fps games.

The switch has a decent library of first party titles which run at a decent framerate so it really begs the question of why dont they all.

I mean, I'm sure there are 30fps games with moving text where it's perfectly legible. I do agree it would be interesting to see if the framerate affects the text can move at and still be legible.

But anyway, I played the Peach demo and it was absolutely fine. There was maybe the odd animation that seemed slightly jerky if I really looked for it, but I would never have thought about it ordinarily.

Yeah you can see the difference between 30fps and 60fps in this image

Hang on...

@Ironcore I am not a game dev and I’m gonna likely say this incorrectly but that is less frame rate and more dynamic text sizing (and they didn’t match it up well). If the text had been static there is no issue. I could be wrong but I feel you are incorrectly attributing that to framerate (or resolution) upping the frame rate wont really resolve that because it is dependent on how the text is being resized on the fly. If it jumps from 10pt font to 15pt instead of say 10pt to 12pt to 15pt it’s gonna look odd no matter what. The text is both shifting perspective and resizing dynamically. So that is just (possibly) poor design choice than technical issue imo.

Granted I didn’t really notice it until I started focusing directly on text and moving slowly. So I suspect the intention was that the player would glance/stop/or be able to take in the text with direct focus due to proper viewing angle. I found if my focus is on peach then I didn’t notice an effect/discomfort to the text. So that may be also a mental processing difference. I can read text perfectly fine in motion on screen without snapping my focus to it.

Because it is to most people. Almost all games can be played just fine at 30fps. Not everyone is ultra-sensitive about this.

I can see and feel the difference when playing, of course, but unless there's a lot of variance games tend to be feel fine to me at lower framerates. Stability is thus important.

This is what that looks like in motion to the human eye.

I don't know how you're getting this, but the game doesn't look like this to me in motion LOL.

Damn, those Xbox 360 graphics are aging like milk.

I've literally played the same games at 30 FPS on the Switch and at 60+ FPS on PC, such as Nier: Automata and No Man's Sky, and if the game has good frame pacing and no jitters, it doesn't really make a difference to me. My eyes can still see the difference, but with good optimisation it's quite small and it doesn't affect the gameplay or my enjoyment of the game. Nier: Automata, for example, is perfect on the Switch and I've played the Switch version much more than the PC version.

I get it that some people are more distracted by low FPS, but it's subjective and not universal at all.

Steamdeck 45fps is such a sweetspot, allowing a decent mix of graphical fidelity alongside a solid enough performance/Framerate.

I still think Switch does well to run its 'AAA' games as well as it does though. TOTK at 30fps (few stutters) is still pretty slick. Monster Hunter Rise also is pretty much a locked 30?

Most films you see at the cinema still run at 24fps. If low frame rates were truly that bad, they'd be unwatchable. They aren't.

The problem has far more to do with consistency of frame rate. Something that's locked at 30 is generally going to be pretty good, unless it's a very twitchy action game, in which case you'll want 60.

That's not to say that high frame rates are bad. It's usually case of the more the better, even. It's just the trade-offs you've got to make to get there and, on the Switch, that's going to mean foregoing a lot of detail.

@Ryu_Niiyama I also find higher frame rates to be odd or unpleasant. I think it's an issue of the motion. It can get too smooth to where it comes across as unnatural. It's less of a problem with games as long as they're not pushing hyper realism for the visuals and if they don't have excessive camera movement like shaky cam and all that garbage. Basically, games can get away with that more, but strange movement does bother me. It's much more pronounced in high frame-rate film and video. Above 30fps looks extremely bizarre to me with motion that looks nothing like natural motion. But higher frame rates massively exacerbate camera movement where even the slightest changes feel much bigger. That really gives me that dizzy feeling you mention. If I can compare the same video at 30 vs. 60, the difference is clear and it's much easier on my brain at 30. It's also why I think third-person games are easier, because the camera is a bit more fixed, relatively speaking.

Ding ding ding!

Generally when people talk about a game having a "poor framerate" what they actually mean is that the frame pacing is inconsistent. You might well argue that 24fps is fine for cinema, and it is given the way image capture inherently give you some built in motion blur. But on a 60hz display that's running at 60Hz it's pretty rough. A good TV will have a cinema mode which has it change its refresh rate to some multiple of 24Hz

The lower the framerate and refresh rate the more jarring a dropped frame will be when the display and game inevitably fall out of sync. That's a large part of why 60fps is more desirable. And why a locked 45fps on the Steam Deck is fine given it has a 90Hz screen

.... it's also why VRR is such a huge deal despite not being as sexy as 4K or HDR

@CJD87 MHR was pretty much locked at 30fps most of the time. So much smoother than World on PS4.

I'm super spoiled by the way you can just adjust the framerate slider on the Steam Deck OLED and it'll adjust the refresh rate to match. Such a cool device.

Nintendo is gonna need to offer something pretty extraordinary with the Switch 2 to entice me, because I can play almost anything I like portably now.