[General Discussion] Lower FPS Standards

The framerate produced by the computer is but one of many factors determining how smooth something appears though. If you had a game running at a constant 120fps but your tv's framerate was 110, it'd look flickery because they're out of synch. It also depends on how sharp the image is. As resolutions increase, things will look worse because the images are sharper so it's easier for your eyes to tell the difference between each frame. The same game running at the same framerate will look far smoother on an SDTV than an HD one as a result.

That's probably why I never understand why people complain about framerates in games. The combination of my elderly eye sight and fairly poor television mean the frames blur together nicely for me and everything looks smooth. That's why I've always prefered concole graphics to PC actually. Games always look too clean on PC, the sharp edges ruin the look of a thing generally.

So yes, the problem isn't neccessarily with the developers, you just need to buy worse tv sets.

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Is your computer monitor a progressive scan one? That would synch the framerates which helps a lot. Also, I imagine your PC was chucking out a higher framerate than your Xbox anyway, seeing as how PAL 360's are capped at 60fps and generally run at 25 or 30 so as to ensure compatabillity with the most tv sets (I think, someone tell me if I'm talking out of my arse).

The problem with consoles is that you only buy the console, you already generally own the tv. It's not like on PCs where you buy a monitor to suit your graphics card, console manufacturers and the developers need to take into consideration the fact that most people don't own a 1080i HD tv set yet and whilst I'm sure they'd love to optimise their games to run on that, it would alienate most of the market which is commercial suicide.

You could try sitting further away from the screen?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

You reckon? See to me that sounds counter-intuitive. I'd rather make a game look good for everyone rather than great for a handful of people and lousy for everyone else. I ain't a game developer though (And I don't have an HDTV). I wonder how long it'll be before the next Silent Hill/Turok LOL fog games start coming out to hide hardware deficiencies?

Some games do a pretty good job of keeping the game looking smooth though. GRID never judders at all, thanks in part to a healthy dose of motion blur when you're going sideways round corners. One wonders whether it's there to convey a sense of speed or to mask the framerate drop when the machine's shifting all of the very detailed background past you at once (As opposed to when you're driving in a straight line and can see mainly track). Whichever, it works.

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