[General Discussion] Lower FPS Standards

This is an issue I've been bothered about myself lately.

You have all these high definition super powered uber consoles with 1080p shining bloom trisplinear HDR graffix with debuffered bespecter face mapping and what not and the framerate hardly goes over 30fps, nor any decent AA. Most of the time the framerate drops really badly when almost anything bigger besides idle animation happens and it's quite awkward looking. With all this horsepower and possibilities, you'd think a high, steady framerate would be pretty important since so much is reliant on presentation.

Yeah ok, so Gran Turismo 5 Prologue apparently goes 60fps (except at the race start camera span where you can see it dropping). This is great, despite the game lacking any kind of sense of speed (unless you assess it solely on the speedometer).

Jam it back in, in the dark.

It's true, I lowered my Orange Box resolutions back down to 1024x768 because I felt it looked "better" with large objects in the distance (since they weren't actually large objects far away, but small objects much closer, meant to look like large objects in the distance). But this wasn't a framerate issue but just regular resolution niggle.

The games look far better and smoother on my PC than the 360 version on my SDTV though (though it looked fine as well).

There's nowhere I can't reach.

What no it looks fine now. The problem with Orange Box was how at a higher resolution the structures in the distance that are supposed to look like they're really huge and far away (the Citadel, for instance), actually reveal themselves to be just small structures much closer. It worked well enough on lower resolutions when the games came out, but with higher resolutions, because the buildings are actually not physically that far away on the map (and therefore lack the detailed textures since you never see them up close unlike say the character models), but merely disguised to look like that, it's more obvious.

I don't have issues with framerates with either the PC nor 360 version (though the PC version obviously runs smoother as the 360 version is probably capped at 30 and that's why I said it looked better).

As for the compatibility thing, I'm having a hard time believing that.
I think console games run around 30 fps because that's usually the limit they can get for a steady framerate with 1080p. If the game ran 576i (PAL) or 480i (NTSC) exclusively, I'm sure you'd see more smoother games, but because a lot of developers have problems optimising for a smooth 60fps at highest resolutions, it's easier for them to cap it at 30 and be done with it and focus on other stuff. For instance, Resistance didn't even do 1080p at all because the developers said they couldn't get good enough results and so they went with 720p. I'm assuming good enough results also referred to framerate performance.

It seems with HD gaming, developers are less likely to ensure compatibility with old TVs, and more concerned with achieving _something_ at the highest resolutions since HD is required for all PS3 and 360 games.

See Sega with their Sonic PS3 game. They admitted there was a bug in the game that caused cutscene videos to judder and glitch on SDTVs and there was no fix for this. I know because we got a lot of calls for that from families (when Sonic was the only kid friendly game for the PS3 and of course they played it on an old TV) who thought there was something wrong with their console.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Well usually the game does look good on SDTV. I feel if a game doesn't look "good" on a TV without the fancy resolutions, then it doesn't look that impressive to begin with. Upped resolution alone doesn't make a game look better for me.

I play 360 and PS3 on my old 29" Sony SDTV and while blu-rays on SD resolutions look like crap and unlike the PC the consoles merely downscale the image instead of actually changing the resolution of the game, they still manage to look very good (Ace Combat 6, Metal Gear Solid 4, Mass Effect etc).

It's with special cases like the Sonic cutscene issues (which I didn't know were physically possible) and Dead Risings super tiny text that it's apparent developers are more concerned with the higher resolutions and expect the game to function just as well on lower ones. And usually they do.

What I think is count-productive is how they can't get those smooth enough framerates because of the very resolutions they are currently marketing their games and consoles with. Most of the time. There's many examples of extremely good looking and very smooth HD games too, but when you have trailers like the new Brothers in Arms game with really choppy framerate, it can't look that impressive even to the average consumer.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?