I will come back to this post in September to see if I was right lol
Biggest concerning signs:
-
30 FPS lock on xbox, there’s no way to spin that positively, absolute fail
-
Predatory pre-order bonus skins to get people to buy before they know what they’re actually going to experience (buggy shitshow)
-
Countless attempts to hype up the game and huge random assurances from the devs
-
Preemptively admitting the game has jank and trying to make it seem okay lol
At least the bugs will be absolutely hilarious I think.
Is this a sign though that games are going to start heading in the direction of 30 fps again? I remember last gen earlier titles would be 60 fps with the cross platform approach, but gradually it became rarer until 30 fps became the norm again with 60 becoming more of an outlier.
Every generation moves back towards 30fps as devs try to push the limits of the hardware.
No, this is a sign that Bethesda can’t get their ancient garbage engine up to snuff.
It could be a problem with modern console’s dynamic resolution. Most console games don’t run close to 4k outside of menus and low action areas. That might break Starfield so they just lock it at 30 fps with a static resolution.
not necessarily. Due to adaptive sync and render thread/game thread can become somewhat doing their stuff in parallel, modern engine can reduce the old fixed 3 frame input lag into mostly 2 frames and with some good scheduling 1 frame input lag is possible for 30fps.(the higher the frame rate the more impossible to achieve 1 frame input lag, like even if your game is just moving a cube in empty space, above certain frame rate it becomes not possible to keep 1 frame input lag due to engine overheads.(note here we do not consider display input lag, just your input action and then later gpu draws the update. )
You can see that’s a very big improvement for 30fps based games. ie. old engine with fixed 3 frames lag, 60fps is about 50ms, where if it’s 30fps but with 2 frames input lag it’s 66.6ms, and it’s not a lot different. So it becomes sort of standard for raytracing enabled game to target 30fps, or like ratchet and clank where they have modes that targets 40fps as a compromise.(that needs a 120hz monitor as support), oh, why 40fps?? if you do the number, 40fps with 2 frames input lag is 50ms, is this number familiar? yep, it’s the same input lag as old engine where 60fps but have fixed 3 frames lag.
Been using 40 on the steam deck a lot with it being a good compromise between battery life but being smoother than 30. Are there any Xbox games that take the 40 fps compromise yet?
It’s fairly new adaptation toward the graphic intensive but also action oriented games. So if you use ratchet & clank as a timestamp, most games before that probably won’t have this feature. But games that come later or indie games where the studios still supports their game, you can probably ask them to implement such feature. (assuming their choice of game engine can support what I mentioned.)
It’s funny, I’ve never thought about the render-ahead queue manipulation being a way to make lower FPS more tolerable.
I don’t mind that the game is targeting 30fps on consoles but man I cannot for the life of me get used to it. I got a Steam Deck and targeting 30fps would let me run more games at native resolution but I haven’t been able to handle the lag and choppiness so I’ve been settling for 40-45.
It was always going to happen. Even most games that offer a ‘60 fps’ performance mode are mostly targeting 30 fps, with the performance mode being an afterthought. They cut back resolution and tons of graphic settings and have the time don’t even hit 60. Like Jedi Survivor ran great in Quality mode with nearly no fps drops throughout the entire game (excluding one small area) while the performance mode had tons of issues.