Whereas in the last generation the vast majority of games were aimed at 30fps, this has now changed and performance mode in the form of 60fps or even up to 120fps has become more or less the standard. At least that’s what we thought until two games were released in the same week, designed exclusively for current generation consoles that only run at 30fps. And although both came to this for completely different reasons, this indicates a certain trend for the future, according to Digital Foundry experts. Details were provided by Richard Leadbetter in an article titled “Why the return of 30 FPS console gaming is inevitable”, and the topic was also covered in a regular podcast.
The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S have been on the market for almost two years now, and it’s true that we haven’t received too many current-gen exclusives in that time, most of the games have also been aimed at the older generation of the console. And although this meant a certain limitation in terms of design, it had one advantage for gamers – an almost guaranteed 60 FPS on new devices. In short, PS4 and XONE are already suffering from a huge performance gap, especially in terms of CPU, which is why current consoles run cross-game at 60fps essentially “on their own”, purely because of the performance difference. . But as versions for older consoles are being phased out, the whole frame rate situation is changing.
Gotham Knights is a rather special case, as it’s a game that was originally supposed to be cross-gen, but the older generation console versions ended up being cancelled. However, the title still looks like a PS4 and XONE game, so the developers’ announcement that there would only be a 30 FPS mode, no choice, sounded even worse. What’s even weirder is that the game runs at 4K resolution, so players naturally started asking why the developers don’t just make a mode with a lower target resolution, like 1440p or even 1080p. Richard Leadbetter of Digital Foundry found the answer, and it’s quite simple – CPU bottleneck.
Gotham Knights is very poorly optimized, but the problem is not in the video card, but in the processor. While testing on PC, he found that even with the combination of Intel Core i9 12900K and GeForce RTX 4090, the game still drops to 45 FPS. More details are provided by Alex Batalha in the video below, where he clearly shows that the graphics card is almost irrelevant, because Gotham Knights is extremely demanding on the processor and graphics settings basically do not matter, practically only ray tracing matters a lot.
In this case, even DLSS will not help, which is only useful if the video card is a limitation. Theoretically, DLSS 3, or frame generation technology, could help, but it is not available in the game, and AMD does not yet have an analogue, so we will not see anything like this on consoles.
But Plague Tale: Requiem is a different story because the game is trying to get the most out of the new consoles, which we showed in our technical analysis. But it’s a frame rate that’s basically only aimed at 30fps at 1440p, and you still can’t avoid the occasional crash.
As tests on a PC have shown (Digital Foundry reports, for example, an analysis from the Analog Foundry channel), this is most likely a problem with the processor. I must say that the new consoles use a processor based on the Zen 2 architecture, which at the time of release was already over a year old, and the much more powerful Zen 3 was slowly entering the market in games.
So are we going back to where we were in the last generation? Will we have to settle for 30 FPS again? It’s possible, but this time it might not be the only option. Thanks to the large expansion of 120Hz capable displays, the 40 FPS option that Plague Tale also offers is becoming increasingly popular (although it’s not exactly stable). However, she has already proven herself in other games such as Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, in both the new Spider-Man and Horizon Forbidden West. Although a 10 fps increase may not sound like much, frame time plays a major role here, i.e. the time that elapses between two frames. And this is almost exactly between 30 FPS (33.3 ms) and 60 FPS (16.7 ms), namely 25 ms, if everything is stable. It is the frame time that often plays a bigger role in the “perception of fluidity” than the frame rate itself.
It’s likely that 40 FPS will be the new “performance mode” in games that try to get the most out of current consoles. However, how the players will perceive it is, of course, another question, because in two years you quickly get used to 60 FPS and don’t really want to go back. After all, the developers of Gotham Knights and A Plague Tale: Requiem have already received a lot of criticism for their decision.
So the way you see it, could you go back to 30 FPS? And how do you like the new golden mean of 40 frames per second?
Source :Indian TV
