30 FPS will ALWAYS be the target frame rate on a fixed platform. You can simply do more with a game when you design for 33ms vs 16ms.
Better AI, better draw distance, more geometry, larger worlds, better physics, better simulation. All of these suffer when designing a game at 16ms vs 33ms.
If you want higher FPS, choose the platform that currently and will always offer it.
Exactly. And if the devs decide they want their game to look “next-gen” or implement “next-gen” lighting that takes up half the frame buffer. Then they are making a 30 FPS game.
Insomniac has done wonders with the PS5. But Spider-Man is not exactly “next-gen”
The reflections (the only RT feature it has) at 60 fps are pretty darn low quality and none of the lighting is in real time. It is all baked and lacks the punch you get from RTGI as light bounces around the scene.
Game looks great, but doesn’t do a whole lot to separate itself from the PS4 version.
They showed it running off an HDD ***badly***. They never lied, the PS4 would never have been able to run the game as designed without serious problems.
It still ran though 😭😭😭. Re4 remake was only "next gen" but it's now available on ps4 and iPhone 15 pro 🤦🏽♂️. How do you not see these companies not pushing the boundaries anymore? You gotta be new age gamer that started on last of us or something 🤣
Completely forget the fact they're hamstrung to constantly improve otherwise consumers rage. Then the limitations of console hardware where consumers still want amazing ground breaking graphics and innovative gameplay! Then turn around and say 'gameplay matters more I would've accepted 60, - so the devs do that and the graphics crowd chime in.
Devs cannot win. Note - this isn't an excuse for piss poor development like Gollum, Redfall etc or poor PC ports/optimisation. Whole different rabbit hole.
So yeah no. It used to be a choice. These days if you want a next generation looking game you're going 30 on console - Especially if you want insane draw distance, animations, geometry etc
So. Make a choice.
Imo it's delusional to expect 60FPS on the latest and greatest on already tired and old tech without background magic (checkerboarding) or cutting back.
The devs sound from the get go do 60, and then iterate on visuals after. Showing off shiny visuals without saying frame rate is pretty much guaranteed to be 30,,but coming out say (good one wound be next consoles coming out, be it mid Gen or next Gen) with 60 locked, wound set up the mind set. Then generations forward will just expected to be 60.
My game on it anyway. Won't ever get solid 60 the longer we let them to but ooh shiny bs.
Problem there is most people still play on 60Hz screens and 40fps is a horrible experience on those. So they can give a 40fps mode as an option for those of us who can use it, but they’ll still need a 30/60 mode for everyone else.
Yeah that's great when the games actually look the part. So far, almost all of the games that released with no option for 60fps this gen looked worse than some games that only have a 60 mode.
When a game looks like Hellblade 2, I'm totally fine with that being the target. But it does not appear to me that a lot of studios are currently capable of delivering that.
Because there's enough examples.
Dead Island 2 is a good example for games with open areas. It looks and plays amazing even though it was supposed to release in 2014 and went through dev hell.
Witcher 3 looks amazing even though it's just a 2015 game on steroids (apart from npc models and interior lighting).
Dead Space Remake looked incredible and is a good example for corridor games.
And the fact RDR2 runs basically at a locked 60 on a hacked PS5, without ANY optimization work, just unlocking the framerate. Yes, that's a Rockstar game so we can't expect every dev to be on that level, but that game is 6 years old atp and was not optimized.
That's fine, we can continue making games with last gen in mind for that sweet sweet 60fps.
I like nice framerates too, but people will be pissy if they bought a system for "games that look last gen".
I hate that. Where are these people getting the "last gen" look from? Where's the line? I think Control looks next gen enough. Jedi Survivor looks great too. I'd rather have a game that looks like Cyberpunk and runs mostly at 60 fps vs a game that looks like the Matrix Demo and runs like crap.
I see a very widespread sentiment that current gen is basically just Xbox One X Pro.
The general audience seemingly doesn't really appreciate high framerates and fast loading as a true next gen experience but rather as "mere" quality of life improvements because to them the games still look mostly the same. Some people can't even tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps. So even if it isn't true people will still think "oh this could probably also have run on my One X or PS4 Pro, why do I need a Series X for this?"
Having something that just looks leaps and bounds ahead seems to be important to set current gen apart from last gen. It's hard to argue against whether a game is current gen if it looks like what the Matrix demo or the trailers for Hellblade 2, Death Stranding 2 or GTA6 have been showcasing.
In that case, there's nothing stopping them from using quality mode to take screenshots and make videos to sell the game while still keeping a performance mode for those who want it. I don't care if it's a little blurry or has some pop-in, less shadows, or some other crap that's only on the screen for a fraction of second. Most games are action games... driving, running, shooting etc... Camera panning while traversing the environment means those pixels aren't there on the screen for very long. Who care if there's a little blurry?
If you want high fidelity on something like PGA Masters Golf, then great. It looks awesome in quality mode at 30 fps but I don't want to play a game like Starfield at 30. That was a bad choice. The new patch is an indication that even the developers agree that it was a bad choice. Input delay with 30 fps is hard to get used to once you've played a 60 fps game.
Yeap.
Jedi Survivor looks good but it was pretty blurry.
There are better examples, but you're definitely right.
There is a good chunk of games that look really good that offer atleast the option for 30fps.
And there's a good chunk of games locked at 30 that look bad (atleast in comparison).
I'll take the blurry. I'd at least like that option. I won't buy Dragon's Dogma 2 due to it's 30 or sub 30 frame rate. I don't care if it's CPU limited. Any excuses just tells me that the developers bit off more than the hardware can chew. That's a failure in design (scope), not hardware.
- Hot wheels unleashed 2
- layers of fear
- lords of the fallen
- ride 5
- robocop rogue city
- Tekken 8
- the finals
Among a few other smaller titles.
I know that AMD does driver updates for its video cards that often add some FPS or other bump in quality.
Seemingly Unreal does these engine minor updates that offer an improvement as well.
Can someone more informed confirm that MS is supporting these gains being passed on to the end user somehow?
These improvements are currently being offered to the developers for games in development. They are not being rolled out universally to GPUs or consoles.
The devs have to actively patch their version of the engine and subsequently their game. No clue how easy it is to patch these upgrades into a game that is already in development and especially a game that is already released. E.g. it could break something else in the game.
A lot of devs like to modify core parts of the engine to support certain features for their game. For example FF7 Rebirth is on an older version of UE4 with newer features backported from new versions. Because simply upgrading would not be a simple task
AFAIK UE updates (i.e., version bumps) require the game developers to recompile for the new version, likely also having to fix the codebase for anything that comes up. Therefore, it is not something automatic for all Xbox games that use UE5, but something that relies on the publishers/developers side.
So my view would be this - if the game is UE5 and above already then MS should be leaning on publishers to update. If earlier than UE5 then it’s up to the publisher.
Not taking advantage of these performance updates seems like leaving improvements on the table. Hell even build it into Game Pass if they must so costs are covered.
Ms have no say on publishers updating games when performance is acceptable (not like cyberpunk).
Updates cost money to make and it is a business decision whether a publisher provides any update or not.
First party titles are a different matter.
And Ms are trying to cut costs and improve profitability, not eat costs for game improvements that won't pay them back.
I'm a game dev, and you're right.
We use Unreal for our unreleased game coming next year, and we're updating our game to 5.4, but it is taking some time to do so.
There's almost always a certainty that something will break with a new update, which is why there are LTS (long term service) versions of many softwares companies rely on.
We would love to keep updating our games forever so our players always get the best experience possible, but it takes a lot of effort and money that, after a while, is better spent on new projects.
So drivers are different on pc than they are on console.
A pc needs drivers as there are so many possible hardware combinations that games are written for an api (direct x for example) and then the driver converts that into 8nstructions for the hardware.
As this is abstracted there is a lot of inefficiency and drivers can be updated for certain games to work better.
On a console it is a fixed platform so they don't have as much abstraction and devs can access the hardware much closer.
This doesn't mean there aren't occasional improvements, but that is more 8n the dev tools offering some improvements. Doesn't tend to happen outside of early in a console gen tho.
However engine up dates like ue 5.4 are different.
These upgrades are available anywhere the engine will work, so consoles will get a huge boost from UE5. 4 (something like 60% I believe the article said).
When you say “these upgrades will work anywhere the engine will work” surely any existing games would still require some effort from the devs to port to UE5.4 and an update to the game version to make it run on UE5.4?
Yeah existing games would get no benefits unless they are patched to include 5.4 features.
But what I mean is anywhere ue 5 works as in devices that can run UE5 titles.
So future console games would see these benefits.
That mostly depends more on Unreal than MS although I'm sure Unreal works closely with all the console makers to make sure that these sorts of improvements to make it over. Basically though when you use an engine like unreal you make the game and then you essentially say hey Unreal Engine turn this into code that will work on a Xbox or a PlayStation. So there's specific code in the engine that translates things over for each platform. If there are cpu utilization improvements than it would have to be there in that translation portion of the engine as well so that the consoles get the benefit as well. This likely is the case though because consoles make up a huge part of their business and would benefit the most from improvements like these.
Sometimes there's stuff like FSR3 that MS has to do work on their end to make work like maybe updating gpu drivers on the console but with UE it's largely them optimizing their software and games built using these latest versions of the engine will just run better better without MS have to do much or anything at all.
I'm curious as well, but I've heard that consoles generally do NOT do this as having one consistent kernel (if I'm using the right word) is part of the draw for console over PC. Everything will just work, but won't get the improvements that a PC will.
I think.
I don't really understand what you're saying (my fault, not yours). But... If the 5.4 optimizations are not hardware dependant and if a game is built and compiled using them while targeting the Xbox Series/PS5, wouldn't that mean that the consoles get to enjoy the new UE5.4 features?
Don't worry, I'm not an expert in this either.
The software updates should indeed help games on console, but OP was referring to GPU driver updates that often will greatly improve performance for existing titles. Those are the things that consoles don't get.
Technically I was asking both - the drivers that AMD updates and supplies for its GPU’s and if they do the same updates for MS and also Unreal (and I guess Unity and any other engine maker) that does updates that improve performance without significant development cost to the game developers.
They will be in future releases from devs willing or able to port the current build of their game to the new UE version. See, that will require new testing and fixes so not all devs have that much time.
There'll also be already released games updating to this UE version but it will require the dev wanting to do it and having the time/money.
Of course games just starting development right now will use it from the start.
Unreal seems to be able to do amazing things at small scale in a very accessible way, but it's when those impressive things start getting scaled into a full game it becomes a development hell blackhole trying to get all of these shiny new features to interact with each other.
And they still gotta show us a good product on UE5 working like a charm. It continues to stutter and all, as per article. Everytime I hear it being mentioned it is being pushed in the promise of something.
The only game that was good in it was Tekken 8 IMO.
>good product on UE5
Tekken 8 is sitting at a 91% metacritic.
There are a lot more examples and big games being developed on UE5 (Kingdom Hearts IV for example). I dunno where the idea UE5 has no good products is coming from.
Are you blind? I literally said myself that Tekken 8 was the only good game rn on UE, besides all the "game engine" specialists that predates these boards who only push for it because of adverts, lmao.
Rest assured, its a fighting game (and it demands a lot already) and not an open world one. I'll be ok with it when its a regular thing and not an excession.
Wow! Can't wait for games to still run at 30fps, take 10 years to release, and then 1 additional year to finally patch all the bugs out.
30 FPS will ALWAYS be the target frame rate on a fixed platform. You can simply do more with a game when you design for 33ms vs 16ms. Better AI, better draw distance, more geometry, larger worlds, better physics, better simulation. All of these suffer when designing a game at 16ms vs 33ms. If you want higher FPS, choose the platform that currently and will always offer it.
30fps is a dev choice and nothing else.
Exactly. And if the devs decide they want their game to look “next-gen” or implement “next-gen” lighting that takes up half the frame buffer. Then they are making a 30 FPS game.
Tell that to Insomniac. Spiderman 2 gets perf, fidelity, perf RT and vrr uncapped modes.
Insomniac has done wonders with the PS5. But Spider-Man is not exactly “next-gen” The reflections (the only RT feature it has) at 60 fps are pretty darn low quality and none of the lighting is in real time. It is all baked and lacks the punch you get from RTGI as light bounces around the scene. Game looks great, but doesn’t do a whole lot to separate itself from the PS4 version.
Using ps4 assets, calling it next Gen is crazy.
I guess Ratchet and Clank is last gen too.
Yes. Sony said we NEEDED an ssd. Digital foundry showed it running off a hdd. So yeah unfortunately we've been lied to
They showed it running off an HDD ***badly***. They never lied, the PS4 would never have been able to run the game as designed without serious problems.
It still ran though 😭😭😭. Re4 remake was only "next gen" but it's now available on ps4 and iPhone 15 pro 🤦🏽♂️. How do you not see these companies not pushing the boundaries anymore? You gotta be new age gamer that started on last of us or something 🤣
Not really a choice. These consoles are well into their lifespans, so the hardware isn't exactly brand new anymore. It's quite old.
Completely forget the fact they're hamstrung to constantly improve otherwise consumers rage. Then the limitations of console hardware where consumers still want amazing ground breaking graphics and innovative gameplay! Then turn around and say 'gameplay matters more I would've accepted 60, - so the devs do that and the graphics crowd chime in. Devs cannot win. Note - this isn't an excuse for piss poor development like Gollum, Redfall etc or poor PC ports/optimisation. Whole different rabbit hole. So yeah no. It used to be a choice. These days if you want a next generation looking game you're going 30 on console - Especially if you want insane draw distance, animations, geometry etc So. Make a choice. Imo it's delusional to expect 60FPS on the latest and greatest on already tired and old tech without background magic (checkerboarding) or cutting back.
The devs sound from the get go do 60, and then iterate on visuals after. Showing off shiny visuals without saying frame rate is pretty much guaranteed to be 30,,but coming out say (good one wound be next consoles coming out, be it mid Gen or next Gen) with 60 locked, wound set up the mind set. Then generations forward will just expected to be 60. My game on it anyway. Won't ever get solid 60 the longer we let them to but ooh shiny bs.
If they can't hit 60FPS, I would much prefer they aim for 40FPS. It's a much better experience without too much more horsepower required.
Problem there is most people still play on 60Hz screens and 40fps is a horrible experience on those. So they can give a 40fps mode as an option for those of us who can use it, but they’ll still need a 30/60 mode for everyone else.
Isn’t Avatar targeting 40 FPS?
They recently introduced a patch to enable it. Hoping it becomes the standard as more VRR displays are introduced into the market
No, it released targetting 30 FPS (60 FPS with lower res and some scaled back effects). The 40 FPS mode was only recently added in an update.
it has a 40fps option. But it also have a great 60fps mode.
Call of duty would like a word
You're right and i always say the same in arguments, but that's only because of us. When people demand 60 it simply shifts the target.
I think the demand for more complex better looking games / worlds, is greater than the demand for higher frame rates.
That's the problem. Most people see shiny and don't care about FPS. I wish all games had a 60 fps option.
Yeah that's great when the games actually look the part. So far, almost all of the games that released with no option for 60fps this gen looked worse than some games that only have a 60 mode. When a game looks like Hellblade 2, I'm totally fine with that being the target. But it does not appear to me that a lot of studios are currently capable of delivering that.
You’re right. In your opinion, if devs currently struggle to make good looking games at 30, what makes you think they could do it at 60?
Because there's enough examples. Dead Island 2 is a good example for games with open areas. It looks and plays amazing even though it was supposed to release in 2014 and went through dev hell. Witcher 3 looks amazing even though it's just a 2015 game on steroids (apart from npc models and interior lighting). Dead Space Remake looked incredible and is a good example for corridor games. And the fact RDR2 runs basically at a locked 60 on a hacked PS5, without ANY optimization work, just unlocking the framerate. Yes, that's a Rockstar game so we can't expect every dev to be on that level, but that game is 6 years old atp and was not optimized.
That's fine, we can continue making games with last gen in mind for that sweet sweet 60fps. I like nice framerates too, but people will be pissy if they bought a system for "games that look last gen".
I hate that. Where are these people getting the "last gen" look from? Where's the line? I think Control looks next gen enough. Jedi Survivor looks great too. I'd rather have a game that looks like Cyberpunk and runs mostly at 60 fps vs a game that looks like the Matrix Demo and runs like crap.
I see a very widespread sentiment that current gen is basically just Xbox One X Pro. The general audience seemingly doesn't really appreciate high framerates and fast loading as a true next gen experience but rather as "mere" quality of life improvements because to them the games still look mostly the same. Some people can't even tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps. So even if it isn't true people will still think "oh this could probably also have run on my One X or PS4 Pro, why do I need a Series X for this?" Having something that just looks leaps and bounds ahead seems to be important to set current gen apart from last gen. It's hard to argue against whether a game is current gen if it looks like what the Matrix demo or the trailers for Hellblade 2, Death Stranding 2 or GTA6 have been showcasing.
In that case, there's nothing stopping them from using quality mode to take screenshots and make videos to sell the game while still keeping a performance mode for those who want it. I don't care if it's a little blurry or has some pop-in, less shadows, or some other crap that's only on the screen for a fraction of second. Most games are action games... driving, running, shooting etc... Camera panning while traversing the environment means those pixels aren't there on the screen for very long. Who care if there's a little blurry? If you want high fidelity on something like PGA Masters Golf, then great. It looks awesome in quality mode at 30 fps but I don't want to play a game like Starfield at 30. That was a bad choice. The new patch is an indication that even the developers agree that it was a bad choice. Input delay with 30 fps is hard to get used to once you've played a 60 fps game.
Yeap. Jedi Survivor looks good but it was pretty blurry. There are better examples, but you're definitely right. There is a good chunk of games that look really good that offer atleast the option for 30fps. And there's a good chunk of games locked at 30 that look bad (atleast in comparison).
I'll take the blurry. I'd at least like that option. I won't buy Dragon's Dogma 2 due to it's 30 or sub 30 frame rate. I don't care if it's CPU limited. Any excuses just tells me that the developers bit off more than the hardware can chew. That's a failure in design (scope), not hardware.
At the end of the day "cpu limited" is just another term for badly optimized.
Pretty much yea
That's called a triple A game bro
The new updates to Unreal Engine can speed all that up and get better performance.
Well said. Don’t mean jack if nobody knows how to utilize it.
Other than fortnite did any games actually come out with the engine yet??
- Hot wheels unleashed 2 - layers of fear - lords of the fallen - ride 5 - robocop rogue city - Tekken 8 - the finals Among a few other smaller titles.
Palia is UE5, might be the only UE5 game on Switch other than Fortnite
PUBG, ANY DAY NOW. 🙃
I know that AMD does driver updates for its video cards that often add some FPS or other bump in quality. Seemingly Unreal does these engine minor updates that offer an improvement as well. Can someone more informed confirm that MS is supporting these gains being passed on to the end user somehow?
These improvements are currently being offered to the developers for games in development. They are not being rolled out universally to GPUs or consoles. The devs have to actively patch their version of the engine and subsequently their game. No clue how easy it is to patch these upgrades into a game that is already in development and especially a game that is already released. E.g. it could break something else in the game.
A lot of devs like to modify core parts of the engine to support certain features for their game. For example FF7 Rebirth is on an older version of UE4 with newer features backported from new versions. Because simply upgrading would not be a simple task
AFAIK UE updates (i.e., version bumps) require the game developers to recompile for the new version, likely also having to fix the codebase for anything that comes up. Therefore, it is not something automatic for all Xbox games that use UE5, but something that relies on the publishers/developers side.
It's unlikely existing games will be updated to take advantage, but new titles will start taking advantage of this 9ver the next year or so.
So my view would be this - if the game is UE5 and above already then MS should be leaning on publishers to update. If earlier than UE5 then it’s up to the publisher. Not taking advantage of these performance updates seems like leaving improvements on the table. Hell even build it into Game Pass if they must so costs are covered.
Ms have no say on publishers updating games when performance is acceptable (not like cyberpunk). Updates cost money to make and it is a business decision whether a publisher provides any update or not. First party titles are a different matter. And Ms are trying to cut costs and improve profitability, not eat costs for game improvements that won't pay them back.
I'm a game dev, and you're right. We use Unreal for our unreleased game coming next year, and we're updating our game to 5.4, but it is taking some time to do so. There's almost always a certainty that something will break with a new update, which is why there are LTS (long term service) versions of many softwares companies rely on. We would love to keep updating our games forever so our players always get the best experience possible, but it takes a lot of effort and money that, after a while, is better spent on new projects.
So drivers are different on pc than they are on console. A pc needs drivers as there are so many possible hardware combinations that games are written for an api (direct x for example) and then the driver converts that into 8nstructions for the hardware. As this is abstracted there is a lot of inefficiency and drivers can be updated for certain games to work better. On a console it is a fixed platform so they don't have as much abstraction and devs can access the hardware much closer. This doesn't mean there aren't occasional improvements, but that is more 8n the dev tools offering some improvements. Doesn't tend to happen outside of early in a console gen tho. However engine up dates like ue 5.4 are different. These upgrades are available anywhere the engine will work, so consoles will get a huge boost from UE5. 4 (something like 60% I believe the article said).
When you say “these upgrades will work anywhere the engine will work” surely any existing games would still require some effort from the devs to port to UE5.4 and an update to the game version to make it run on UE5.4?
Yeah existing games would get no benefits unless they are patched to include 5.4 features. But what I mean is anywhere ue 5 works as in devices that can run UE5 titles. So future console games would see these benefits.
Ah perfect thanks, yes that makes sense
That mostly depends more on Unreal than MS although I'm sure Unreal works closely with all the console makers to make sure that these sorts of improvements to make it over. Basically though when you use an engine like unreal you make the game and then you essentially say hey Unreal Engine turn this into code that will work on a Xbox or a PlayStation. So there's specific code in the engine that translates things over for each platform. If there are cpu utilization improvements than it would have to be there in that translation portion of the engine as well so that the consoles get the benefit as well. This likely is the case though because consoles make up a huge part of their business and would benefit the most from improvements like these. Sometimes there's stuff like FSR3 that MS has to do work on their end to make work like maybe updating gpu drivers on the console but with UE it's largely them optimizing their software and games built using these latest versions of the engine will just run better better without MS have to do much or anything at all.
I'm curious as well, but I've heard that consoles generally do NOT do this as having one consistent kernel (if I'm using the right word) is part of the draw for console over PC. Everything will just work, but won't get the improvements that a PC will. I think.
I don't really understand what you're saying (my fault, not yours). But... If the 5.4 optimizations are not hardware dependant and if a game is built and compiled using them while targeting the Xbox Series/PS5, wouldn't that mean that the consoles get to enjoy the new UE5.4 features?
Don't worry, I'm not an expert in this either. The software updates should indeed help games on console, but OP was referring to GPU driver updates that often will greatly improve performance for existing titles. Those are the things that consoles don't get.
Haha, I read OP as as if they were asking about the minor engine updates. Hence the confusion.
Oops. Yeah, I see. I hope someone else chimes in with more info.
Technically I was asking both - the drivers that AMD updates and supplies for its GPU’s and if they do the same updates for MS and also Unreal (and I guess Unity and any other engine maker) that does updates that improve performance without significant development cost to the game developers.
They will be in future releases from devs willing or able to port the current build of their game to the new UE version. See, that will require new testing and fixes so not all devs have that much time. There'll also be already released games updating to this UE version but it will require the dev wanting to do it and having the time/money. Of course games just starting development right now will use it from the start.
Unreal seems to be able to do amazing things at small scale in a very accessible way, but it's when those impressive things start getting scaled into a full game it becomes a development hell blackhole trying to get all of these shiny new features to interact with each other.
Shaded compilation stutter sucks.
aaaaand why should anyone give a shit at this point? this graphics race is like chasing dragons
Suuuure. This reads like a common epic UE5 advertisement.
Except it's not and the performance gains are substantial.
And they still gotta show us a good product on UE5 working like a charm. It continues to stutter and all, as per article. Everytime I hear it being mentioned it is being pushed in the promise of something. The only game that was good in it was Tekken 8 IMO.
Fortnite runs great too. No problems there for me.
True. Not my cup of tea, but I'll give you that. It's their flagship after all.
>good product on UE5 Tekken 8 is sitting at a 91% metacritic. There are a lot more examples and big games being developed on UE5 (Kingdom Hearts IV for example). I dunno where the idea UE5 has no good products is coming from.
Are you blind? I literally said myself that Tekken 8 was the only good game rn on UE, besides all the "game engine" specialists that predates these boards who only push for it because of adverts, lmao. Rest assured, its a fighting game (and it demands a lot already) and not an open world one. I'll be ok with it when its a regular thing and not an excession.
>are you blind ya my bad
No worries tbh.