Carmack: Next-Gen Console Games Will Still Aim For 30fps

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Carmack: Next-Gen Console Games Will Still Aim For 30fps

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday December 18, 2012 @06:16PM from the take-that-peter-jackson dept.

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from Develop: "Games developed for the next-generation of consoles will still target a performance of 30 frames per second, claims id Software co-founder John Carmack. Taking to Twitter, the industry veteran said he could 'pretty much guarantee' developers would target the standard, rather than aiming for anything as high as 60 fps. id Software games, such as Rage, and the Call of Duty series both hit up to 60 fps, but many titles in the current generation fall short such as the likes of Battlefield 3, which runs at 30 fps on consoles. 'Unfortunately, I can pretty much guarantee that a lot of next gen games will still target 30 fps,' said Carmack."

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Detail by Dan+East · 2012-12-18 18:20 · Score: 4, Insightful

Would you rather have double the detail at 30 FPS, or half the detail at 60 FPS? Considering most people can't perceive frame rates faster than 30, it makes a bit of sense to push more polygons instead.

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1. Re:Detail by Radres · 2012-12-18 18:21 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I think Carmack's point is that the other studios will push half the content at 30fps because they're lazy.
2. Re:Detail by icsx · 2012-12-18 18:32 · Score: 0
  
  You cant put it up like that. It's not a valid comparison. Level done running with 60fps can be a lot cooler than a level with 30fps, stuffed in with useless crap without creativity. Console hardware is usually so poor that often games are running on lower resolution which is then scaled to full screen to achieve that 30fps in the first place anyway.
  
  And please, don't start that 30fps human eye thing. It's not the same as in games because if you have 60 fps instead of 30 fps, you have 50% more frames that makes the game running smoother. Then there is motion blur too that is often used to hide the fact that game runs bad.
3. Re:Detail by epyT-R · 2012-12-18 18:38 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Not this again.. This assumption is based on perceived motion from frames containing captured motion blur and even in such (24/30hz) frames, motion is NOT transparent to most people. With games there is no temporal data in frames, so it's VERY obvious. Even 60 is to many gamers, and is why they opt for 120hz (real 120hz, not hdtv '120' interpolated which looks terrible) panels and video cards that can push them.
  Then there is input lag. Its perceived turnaround time is very noticeable at 30fps, and if the rendering is not decoupled from the input polling/irq, the latter's latency actually does go up. id had to patch quake 4 to make it acceptable to play because the 60hz was dropping inputs and looked choppy as hell compared to previous releases. Enemy Territory quake wars, which is also idtech4, was locked at 30 and was deemed unplayable by many.. I think it was one of the reasons the game tanked. It was actually painful to look at in motion.
  Console devs always push excessive graphics at the expense of gameplay because the publishers want wow factor over playability. This was true in the 8bit and 16bit days too. Some games suffered so badly they were deemed unplayable. This is why pc gamers value useful graphics configuration capability in their games. Often what the publishers/devs thought as 'playable' was not what the community thought was playable, not that this should shock anyone with today's 'quality' releases.
4. Re:Detail by MrHanky · 2012-12-18 18:41 · Score: 1
  
  Most people certainly can perceive frame rates faster than 30 FPS. The difference between 30 and 60 FPS when playing a game on a modern LCD display is huge. Stop perpetuating dumb myths.
5. Re:Detail by El_Muerte_TDS · 2012-12-18 18:41 · Score: 1
  
  Considering most people can't perceive frame rates faster than 30
  [Citation Needed]
  The difference is very noticeable, but the "problem" is reduced due to enormous input lag that is present in most console setups. Also in action heavy scenes you will notice it less that everything is moving less smooth.
  The difference in 30 fps vs 60 fps for cameras is less noticeable due to motion blur unless you slow down the rendering. Sure you can make 30 fps games look smoother by applying motion blur, but that only makes the end result blurrier.
6. Re:Detail by PhrostyMcByte · 2012-12-18 18:43 · Score: 1
  
  Would you rather have double the detail at 30 FPS, or half the detail at 60 FPS?
  It depends entirely on the game. In a twitch shooter like Quake where you expect constant feedback, things feel drastically wrong at 30fps. In a single-player shooter? These are rarely built for competitive players, and don't need quick response. I can handle 30fps if it has decent motion blur, like Crysis. In an RPG? 30fps is mildly annoying but playable.
  But that's only what I can tolerate, without shelving the game for a future video card. If I had a choice? I'd pick 60fps over 30fps every time. It's one of those things you don't realize you want until you've had it -- I guarantee console players would love it too if given the choice.
7. Re:Detail by Nyder · 2012-12-18 18:48 · Score: 0
  
  Would you rather have double the detail at 30 FPS, or half the detail at 60 FPS? Considering most people can't perceive frame rates faster than 30, it makes a bit of sense to push more polygons instead.
  When it comes to games, you can tell the difference between 30 fps and 60 fps. TV/Movies, No, you can't. Video games, yes you can.
  
  --
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8. Re:Detail by Omestes · 2012-12-18 18:52 · Score: 1
  
  Considering most people can't perceive frame rates faster than 30..
  Can we please stop with this falsity already? In an FPS, you most assuredly can tell the difference between 30 and 60fps. More frames, means more, smoother, motion, which means higher accuracy. 30fps also looks a bit "juttery" with fast motions, especially with digital graphics, since there is no recorded motion blur to cover it up. Also, why all the brouhaha over the Hobbit being at 48fps and not the standard 24, if no one could notice it?
  
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9. Re:Detail by flayzernax · 2012-12-18 18:55 · Score: 1
  
  I can attest that framerates of 60 matter. At least from a long time playing quake3 and other similar FPS's competatively online. Also a consistant framerate that does not spike is very helpful.
  I would say its very game dependent though, games that are highly twitched based and less strategic tend to get more mental attention in the FPS department. Other games like an MMO or RTS I hardly notice FPS even if it can drop to an abysmal 17fps if I'm still immersed.
  Then you have some displays that can barely handle motion at 20fps (some LCD's are still not quite up to par).
  But as a professional basement dwelling gamer, I know the studios who want to make money off online competative play need to focus on FPS and level/game flow over everything else.
10. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 18:58 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  ... Considering most people can't perceive frame rates faster than 30 ...
  This myth needs to die.
  Everybody can perceive frame rates faster than 30 fps. In fact, almost everybody can perceive frame rates faster than 100. Check the linked article, this is really a tricky question. Some things to consider:
  - Games have no motion blur, or, as many modern games are implementing now, they use a pathetic, fake imitation that looks worse than no motion blur at all. Hence, they need much higher frame rates to show fluid motion. At 60 fps with current technology (including so-called next-gen), motion will look much better compared to 30.
  - Decades of cinema have been training most people to perceive low-quality, blurred animation as 'film quality', and smooth, crisp animation as 'fake' or 'TV quality'. Many, many people consider a 48fps Hobbit to be worse compared to a 24 fps one. This is a perception problem. Games could have the same issues, except they've evolved much faster and most people didn't have the time to get used to bad quality.
  - Consider the resolution problem. Higher resolution requires higher fidelity. At higher resolution, you'll demand higher quality textures and shading to reach similar levels of immersion, since details are now much more apparent. Same thing happens with animation and higher frame rates. This doesn't meen we should stay at low resolutions, 16 colors, black & white, or 30 fps. This just means we need to do better.
  - And... a game is not film, and latency matters. A lot. At 30 fps, you need to wait twice the time to see any feedback from your input. In most games you will just train yourself to input the commands in anticipation without even knowing a word about latency, but in action games, where your reaction time matters, latency is a problem. And many other sources of latency add to the sum, such as clumsy 'smart' TVs post-processing your images, or badly engineered 'casual' motion wi-fi controllers.
  In other words, yes, I'd rather have half the detail and 60 FPS. Except if your game is no game at all, and just a 6 to 10 hours movie. Since most of the top videogame chart entries fill this description today, I can see why many developers will remain at the 30 fps camp.
11. Re:Detail by Nyder · 2012-12-18 19:00 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Would you rather have double the detail at 30 FPS, or half the detail at 60 FPS? Considering most people can't perceive frame rates faster than 30, it makes a bit of sense to push more polygons instead.
  When it comes to games, you can tell the difference between 30 fps and 60 fps. TV/Movies, No, you can't. Video games, yes you can.
  I should of mentioned the reason why.
  When you shoot video you capture single pictures. When people are moving in these shots, the have motion blur. How much motion blur depends on how fast they are moving and how many shots per sec you take. Our eyes see the motion blur and our mind fills in the rest, which is why we are okay with 24 & 30 fps for movies/videos.
  When you do video games, each frame is smoother, doesn't have the motion blur that real life video would have. Granted, games started adding in motion blur, but it's not the same. This is why the more frames per sec generally make games look better and play better.
  We did cover this in the Hobbit at 48fps submission.
  
  --
  Be seeing you...
12. Re:Detail by strack · 2012-12-18 19:00 · Score: 1
  
  you totally can tell the difference between 30 and 60 fps in tv/movies.
13. Re:Detail by Gerzel · 2012-12-18 19:01 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  Also depends on what they are doing with that extra processing power. Are you making a game that is more intuitive? That reacts and learns better? That has AI that is more intelligent that adds to game play?
  Really 30fps is the range of reasonable quality. You get a diminished return as you increase fps especially if the rest of the game doesn't perform to the same standard.
14. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 19:18 · Score: 2
  
  if you have 60 fps instead of 30 fps, you have 50% more frames
  None of your post really made much sense, but this bit isn't even correct math...
15. Re:Detail by frinsore · 2012-12-18 19:19 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  For a 60fps game there's about 16ms per frame and with current gen consoles about 8ms is lost to API call overhead on the render thread. Of course current gen consoles are years behind and constrain rendering APIs to be called from a single thread but I'd still be very surprised if there was a console that could support a triple A game above 70fps in the next 10 years (for resolutions 720p and above).
  You've barely scratched the surface of input to perception lag, here's an answer by Carmack to people questioning another one of his tweets:
  http://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-faster-than-sending-a-pixel-to-the-screen
  Of course most engines come from a single threaded game mentality where they'd poll for input, apply input to game state, do some AI, do some animations, calculate physics, then render everything and repeat. Current gen consoles has freed that up some but most engines didn't go above 2 or 3 major threads because it's a difficult problem to re-architect an entire engine while it's being used to make a game at the same time. Sadly the better games gave user input it's own thread and polled input every 15ms or so, queued it up, and then passed it on to the game thread when the game thread asked for it. Input wasn't lost as often but it didn't get to the game any faster.
16. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 19:25 · Score: 0
  
  Half the detail at 60fps of course. Actually I rather play fast-paced shooters @ 120fps on 120hz screen. Although 144hz monitor would be even nicer...
17. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 19:37 · Score: 0
  
  I have strong feelings against that "most". However, given the majority of these players will be playing on TVs with massive input lag, using a controller, playing a lot of single player games, and having aim correction built in, I doubt most of them will have the experience to know the difference.
18. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 19:48 · Score: 1
  
  The human eye can percieve far beyond 30fps. There are studies which show pilots picking out single frames from 500fps.
  I was a hardcore gamer when I was younger, with some LAN achievements under my belt, and I dislike playing under 120hz, and prefered my CRT to be sitting at 140hz. People online attempt to say this is placebo, but pretty much everyone at those 4000man competitive competitions would comment on how smooth the high HZ / high FPS combos were, and that vast majority of top players (I know everyone thinks they're amazing at games, but I'm specifically talking about those who earn money playing games) play with higher than 100hz / FPS.
  Obviously the difference between gaming and a movie is motion blur (deals with the smoothness) and the fact you aren't controlling the movie (meaning the input lag doesn't affect you).
19. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 19:56 · Score: 0
  
  Level done running with 60fps can be a lot cooler than a level with 30fps, stuffed in with useless crap without creativity.
  That's only one consideration. The framerate is generally dependent on the max number of polygons which can be rendered on-screen at a time. You can increase the number of objects at the cost of detail per object, or increase the detail of individual objects at a cost of total objects on screen.
  The total number of polygons on-screen at 60fps is going to be much lower than the total number at 30fps, given the same hardware. We simply don't have good enough hardware to support as many models with as much detail as consumers are demanding even at 30fps, so most studios aren't even considering a decrease in polygons in order to achieve the higher FPS numbers.
  If consumers would pay for games based on gameplay rather than graphics appeal this wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue.
20. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 19:57 · Score: -1
  
  Obviously, nobody really gives a fuck about pixel-counting bullshit. Nobody's going to be doing QiII 180s with a pad anyway, and frankly that kind of game is out of date. You don't see soldiers in the field do 180 snapshots either.
  And re your remark about 'quality' releases, souds like your butthurt that nobody wants to play old-style games any more. You just have to deal with it. I enjoy text adventures, but I'm hardly mad that they're a fringe activity now.
21. Re:Detail by epyT-R · 2012-12-18 20:08 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah, I read about that.. some games/drivers/engines are absolutely terrible. I think I was spoiled by the earlier quakes.. of course they had bugs too, but todays games are terrible. I suppose not everything is a competitive shooter, but that doesn't mean it should drop or lag input.. It makes the game incredibly frustrating to play.
22. Re:Detail by 91degrees · 2012-12-18 20:18 · Score: 1
  
  Better frame rate
  
  You do notice this sort of thing. Even menus seem a lot more responsive at 60fps.
23. Re:Detail by epyT-R · 2012-12-18 20:23 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  lets count the fallacies shall we?
  1. argument from antiquity (it's old so it sucks)
  2. argument from inverse popularity (no one does it now so it sucks)
  3. appeal to realism (when did I say quake was realistic? I said higher steady framerate allows for better perception of action)
  4. ad hominem. I'm not butthurt. Perhaps you prefer COD et al because you can't play something requiring more attention and lower reaction time. It's alright, I'm not crazy at quake either.. I was only a bit above average as far as competent players go, but I enjoyed the fluid, fast gameplay much more than the tedious waiting and camping of CS, action quake and its subsequent 'realism' clones. There's no need for insults.
  If anything, it's the dominant playerbase who reason like your post who are to blame for why so many games today lack actual gameplay learning curves. There's nothing to master and it's all about pressing the right button at the right time a la dragon's lair single player, or having a real time rendered backdrop for VOIP 'multiplayer' conversations...all of this while fumbling around with simplified gameplay mechanics despite the fact they were dumbed down specifically to make the pad workable at all. That's not what I got into gaming for, but to each their own.
24. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 20:31 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  I should of mentioned the reason why.
  I should have mentioned the reason why.
  Just an FYI...
25. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 20:32 · Score: 0
  
  Why do people complain about the lack of "warmth" in a CD versus vinyl? Or the purported loss of sound quality for that matter? A lot of that isn't quite perceived, but the eye can see that something isn't right.
  I'm a bit shocked that people are bitching about it, but I haven't had a chance to see the movie. The main time that you should see a difference is on panning shots, which is I believe the reason why they moved to 48fps anyways.
26. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 20:55 · Score: 0
  
  Prices going down 300%, 50% frames on 60 fps vs on 30 fps.
  Why do idiots even try to use percentages?
27. Re:Detail by mwvdlee · 2012-12-18 21:03 · Score: 1
  
  Here a "30fps human eye thing" for you; human eyes don't have anything remotely equivalent to a TV refresh rate.
  
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28. Re:Detail by dnaumov · 2012-12-18 21:49 · Score: 1
  
  Would you rather have double the detail at 30 FPS, or half the detail at 60 FPS? Considering most people can't perceive frame rates faster than 30, it makes a bit of sense to push more polygons instead.
  Stop with this misinformation. Most people definately CAN percieve framerates faster than 30.
  http://boallen.com/fps-compare.html
  If you honestly cant tell the difference between 30 and 60 in the above link, you might want to have yourself checked.
29. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 21:52 · Score: 1
  
  You are too nice.
  I would of said "Should HAVE, you illiterate son of a bitch"
30. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 22:06 · Score: 1
  
  I've seen 300fps on a prototype screen with a 300 fps camera. It helps in sharpness of moving object immensely because the eye can track objects on the screen perfectly so it can read high details. These details are either lost in motion blur, or when you use a small shutter angle it steps over the screen making it difficult for the eyes to track it as a moving object.
31. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 22:21 · Score: 0
  
  Saying that movies look better at lower FPS because of motion blur is exactly like saying that anti-aliasing improves image quality by blurring the picture - it's sort of right in some twisted way, but it's very misleading (if you don't know why, look up anti-aliasing and contrast it to blurring). Think about what anti-aliasing is and then apply that to the time domain - i.e., suppose you take the average of many frames for each displayed framed. That's the benefit movies have - temporal anti-aliasing. It's far better than just motion blur.
32. Re:Detail by Fr33z0r · 2012-12-18 22:24 · Score: 1
  
  A valid point, with one caveat: everybody can perceive frame rates faster than 30.
33. Re:Detail by somersault · 2012-12-18 22:34 · Score: 1
  
  I could most definitely tell the difference between The Hobbit at 48fps and a normal movie. I didn't actually like the effect much, but I could tell the difference.
  When gaming and constantly monitoring my FPS, 30 was playable, 60 was nice.
  I remember with Quake 1 experimenting with different resolutions on my 486 with software rendering - 320x240 actually looked very "realistic" to me simply because it was rendering so smoothly. It looked like live action through a low resolution camera. I usually played at 640x480 though just because it's nice to be able to make enemies out at a distance..
  
  --
  which is totally what she said
34. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 23:35 · Score: 0
  
  you CAN perceive... because game frame rates are generated and not captured, they are a totally different beast! (basically, you're comparing apples with oranges...)
35. Re:Detail by N!k0N · 2012-12-19 00:07 · Score: 1
  
  Fun link. I couldn't really tell a difference, but I think it's more a failing of:
  a. It's early, and coffee hasn't kicked in
  b. shit monitor on this laptop is only tall enough to display one of the bouncy blocks.
  The links on that page to other FPS examples that were closer together/side-by-side were easier to distinguish, to the point where 48 v. 60 FPS had a slight (but still noticeable) difference. Since "The Hobbit" is such a hot topic of discussion in this thread, I did see it in 3D (48FPS), and found it *much* more enjoyable than 24FPS 3D movies I've seen (e.g. "The Avengers" earlier this year) simply due to the lessening of the motion blur. Really, the only thing that took "getting used to" was that I kept thinking "holy fucking shit, why haven't we done this sooner!?".
  Thing is, I think most of the complaining is more hype than anything, and people wanting to "fit in" -- friend I went with didn't know it was the 48FPS version (though read reviews of it, and kept warning us to not see it), was praising how great it looked -- was fun as hell when the rest of us told him he just sat through the 48FPS version.
36. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 00:18 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  I should of mentioned the reason why.
  Repeat after me: "should've" means "should have", not "should of".
37. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 00:28 · Score: 0
  
  actually no, how much motion blur you get depends on the shutter speed - not framerate.
  A 100fps footage taken with shutter speed of 1/4000s will be jerky, even tough you have a high framerate.
38. Re:Detail by poetmatt · 2012-12-19 00:41 · Score: 1
  
  That's not a choice or *the* choice.
  The reality is, most people would like games to be programmed for actual quality and let the hardware be the issue for 60FPS and not simply let people be lazy by aiming for a low bar. You don't get double detail at 30 FPS, you get 1/4 the detail because it's targeted at consoles.
39. Re:Detail by Ash+Vince · 2012-12-19 00:57 · Score: 1
  
  The human eye can percieve far beyond 30fps. There are studies which show pilots picking out single frames from 500fps.
  I was a hardcore gamer when I was younger, with some LAN achievements under my belt, and I dislike playing under 120hz, and prefered my CRT to be sitting at 140hz.
  Nowadays most decent sized (26 inch+) LCD displays don't go above 60hz so your graphics card might tell you it is rendering at 200fps but everything above 60fps is being thrown away.
  You certainly never get anything as high as 120hz anymore unfortunately. I just checked and the best I could find was 75hz vertical at 27inch. You might be able to go better than this if you stay small but you really need a screen size of 26inch for FPS gaming to pick people up at long distance if they are hiding behind stuff and only the top part of their head is visible.
  
  --
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40. Re:Detail by LazyBoot · 2012-12-19 01:07 · Score: 1
  
  IIRC most 3D monitors can run at 120hz when not in 3D mode
41. Re:Detail by Terrasque · 2012-12-19 01:08 · Score: 1
  
  Even better comparison tool imho:
  http://frames-per-second.appspot.com/
  Can change move speed, fps, motion blur effect, and number of moving spheres (with different settings) live.
  
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42. Re:Detail by ildon · 2012-12-19 01:10 · Score: 1
  
  I'm getting really tired of this myth being repeated all the time. Unless your vision is TERRIBLE, you can totally perceive FPS higher than 30. Just because people don't realize why something looks "weird" or "different" doesn't mean they're not perceiving the higher frames. Just look at all the reviews and posts complaining about the high frame rate version of The Hobbit. If people couldn't perceive those extra frames, they wouldn't be complaining that it "looked too real" or "like a soap opera."
  The reason companies aren't going to go for 60 FPS on new hardware is because high frame rates don't make for fancy screenshots, and their mentality is still that pretty screen shots sell games (and they're probably right). When they can spend that pixel bandwidth doubling the textures or whatever to make pretty screenshots, and still hit 30 FPS, that's what they're going to do.
43. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 01:33 · Score: 0
  
  Nowadays most decent sized (26 inch+) LCD displays don't go above 60hz
  And that's hardcore gamers, such as what the grandparent described, prefer CRT monitors.
44. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 02:00 · Score: 0
  
  - this. I have a 3D monitor and to anyone who says you cant see the difference.. please please please stfu. I HAVE the monitor and the difference between 60 and 120 is night and day. The motions are more clear/smooth, the reaction time blows my second 60hz montior out of the water and the overall experience is easier on the eyes. I actually believe that for 3D to survive and win over the nay sayers they need to increase the 3D to 120hz per eye. 60 is a huge improvement over my 3D crt days but its clear that the refresh rate and frame rate can make or break a 3D image. At 120hz per eye the image would be as a solid hologram poping off the screen and cause little, if any, eye strain.
45. Re:Detail by scarboni888 · 2012-12-19 02:06 · Score: 1
  
  What I don't understand is why we would have to settle for a choice of one or the other.
  I'll take BOTH thank you very much.
46. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 02:33 · Score: 0
  
  The ones that do run 60fps have better visual response to input - which may be required for some games.
47. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 02:48 · Score: 0
  
  Why the hell to people keep parroting this nonsense?
  People can see well past 120FPS differences.
  It is as retarded as the "oh you can't tell the difference between 720 and 1080" stupid arguments too.
48. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 03:03 · Score: -1
  
  Gamers and game devs are the definition of lazy. Been to Seattle? They basically stand in line @ the weed store all day.
  I should know, I do ERP consulting, I get my weed fucking DELIVERED.
49. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 03:08 · Score: 0
  
  what???
  first off, you don't get half performance for twice the detail. there in no way proportional. and second EVERYONE on earth can see the difference between 1 and 120fps. some of them may not CARE but they can totally see it, and it give them generally a better experience.
50. Re:Detail by jon3k · 2012-12-19 03:16 · Score: 1
  
  Considering most people can't perceive frame rates faster than 30
  Source please
51. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 03:25 · Score: 0
  
  You should probably tell "most people" that they're getting screwed if they paid to watch the hobbit at 48 fps.
52. Re:Detail by Johann+Lau · 2012-12-19 03:35 · Score: 1
  
  Considering most people can't perceive frame rates faster than 30
  Are you kidding? Not only do I notice the difference, the difference.is huge. Oh, and remember CRT monitors, with very high refresh rates at lower resolutions? Not even 60fps is "more than enough and well beyond the treshold of noticing a difference". Small dips are noticeable, too.
  Of course, I'm talking action games that require precision and aim. I am not talking about cutscenes, "mash button to trigger random crap" gameplay, puzzle games or aimbot-assisted singleplayer. When it comes to actual precision and prediction at breakneck speed, there is no contest between 60 and 30fps. Sure, "most people" wouldn't notice, but "most people" also wouldn't last 5 seconds when playing pinball, so, umh? The question really is, are you making a game, or product that's supposed to entice people with eye candy screenshots instead of offering solid gameplay?
  Most game makers seem to have answered that question, and now moved into player statistics, where they focus their actual effort, where their eyes get real big and shiny, where their talks get really in-depth. I actually heard Molyneux say on youtube yesterday how he values "his success as a designer" by wether people are willing to pay for his shit... not, you know, making a game, playtesting it, and saying "this is a good game, and if I'm lucky others will like it as well." Does a musician measure their skill by number of copies sold? Do they treat their audience like lab rats? Bullshit, only a whore would do. And do the fans of whores recognize this? FUCK NO. Ever tried talking sense to a Bieber fan? Gamers are so much worse. "I'm not that bright and this makes me feel cool, please go away" is pretty much the gist of it.
53. Re:Detail by tlhIngan · 2012-12-19 04:14 · Score: 1
  
  The real reason is if you want to target 60, you have to aim higher because if you just take a bit too long, your framerate drops dramatically.
  Target 30, and you can probably render everything in time and have time to spare. But target 60 and miss, and you'll stutter, visibly.
  That's the real issue - it's also why PC gamers go for the fastest video card even though their monitors may only refresh at 60Hz or so - you need to be able to do 60+ fps constantly in order to hit 60 fps solidly. Dip below that and you stutter.
  For this generation, it did make sense since a lot of people had SDTVs and such where 30p could be converted to 60i trivially (and there were still a lot of devices that only handled 1080i60, or 1080p30, which consumed the same bandwidth as 720p60).
  Next gen, devs may target 30 purely because they're not sure how the hardware will handle things - throw a bit too much geometry in by accident and end up in a case of stutters, or try to achieve a more solid 30fps without stuttering because 30 is achievable, but 60 was not.
54. Re:Detail by Gibgezr · 2012-12-19 05:12 · Score: 1
  
  Somewhere there is a study done on air-force pilots that showed they could perceive details at 1/500th of a second. The human eye certainly works at much higher "speeds" than that silly myth of 30 fps suggests.
55. Re:Detail by Gibgezr · 2012-12-19 05:19 · Score: 1
  
  When it comes to games, you can tell the difference between 30 fps and 60 fps. TV/Movies, No, you can't. Video games, yes you can.
  Wrong, you can easily tell the difference in TV/Movies as well. I had my students do a test: display the same movie, side-by-side-by-side, running at 120/60/30 fps (on 120Hz monitors, naturally...the lower fps versions are made by dropping frames/duplicating the ones left, so they all ran at 120Hz, but different fps). They could ALL tell the difference.
  Myth busted.
56. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 05:46 · Score: 0
  
  I think he could care less.
57. Re:Detail by bill_mcgonigle · 2012-12-19 06:02 · Score: 1
  
  For a 60fps game there's about 16ms per frame and with current gen consoles about 8ms is lost to API call overhead on the render thread.
  The perceptual limit is around 15ms, so with your numbers that speaks to a 120Hz frame rate, effectively, being the human-factors base value for seamless playability.
  I suppose one day we'll look back at sub-120Hz games as having that 'old-fashioned' look.
  
  --
  My God, it's Full of Source!
  OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
58. Re:Detail by nu1x · 2012-12-19 06:23 · Score: 1
  
  What is interesting here is that there are perceivable differences (sharp black/white patern vs. blurred) between 60 and 120 fps here, and my monitor is 60Hz.
  Is there some hackery going on ?
  IIYAMA E2080HSD here.
  
  --
  I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
59. Re:Detail by dywolf · 2012-12-19 06:29 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, that 0.016 second of difference betwen 30 and 60 fps matters. Yup. that's some super high latency there. It really throws off the shots.
  I mean there I was firing the gun, waiting that extra 0.016 of a second to see where the impact landed before firing another shot, repeating this action a few hundred times per second....
  Oh and a no true scotsman fallacy too, in the form of a personal opinion that no recent game is a -REAL- game but really just a long movie.
  Bravo.
  
  --
  The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
60. Re:Detail by drkoemans · 2012-12-19 06:33 · Score: 1
  
  I should of mentioned the reason why.
  When you shoot video you capture single pictures. When people are moving in these shots, the have motion blur. How much motion blur depends on how fast they are moving and how many shots per sec you take.
  Speed of subject, frames (images) per second, and time of exposure per frame dictate how much blur there will be present. A fast moving subject at 48FPS with an exposure of 1/48 may also have motion blur. The chariot scenes in gladiator come to mind for the opposite effect at 24FPS. Scott set his exposure to 1/2000 or higher which even at a low FPS results in VERY crisp shots with no blur, you just need boatloads of light for an exposure time that short.
61. Re:Detail by oracleofbargth · 2012-12-19 06:37 · Score: 1
  
  There is a problem with your correction. I believe the post in question was trying to represent the contraction "shoud've," but instead printed it phonetically as "should of."
62. Re:Detail by UnknownSoldier · 2012-12-19 07:08 · Score: 1
  
  *sigh* Not this "I can't see more then 30 fps" crap again.
  Give users a CHOICE:
  Some want QUALITY
  Some want PERFORMANCE
  Who is right? BOTH !!
  Personally I prefer 72 to 100 Hz because in a HUGE multiplayer fight your framerate WILL drop. This "safety margin" (usually) guarantees the framerate will stay above 60 Hz.
  The second reason is that IF the game supports proper 3D then 30 FPS is not a helluva easier for the dev to do then trying to figure out what details to start dropping to get back UP to 30.
63. Re:Detail by orthicviper · 2012-12-19 07:09 · Score: 1
  
  double the detail at 30 fps over half the detail at 60 fps kinda worthless because it is hard to see finer details at a low 30fps rate.
64. Re:Detail by FraGNeM · 2012-12-19 07:19 · Score: 1
  
  This is correct. Most 3D monitors double as 120hz monitors. They need double the refresh to get 60hz to each eye using active shutter glasses.
65. Re:Detail by robthebloke · 2012-12-19 07:26 · Score: 2
  
  That's not really how it works. Every dev I've ever worked with in the games industry, all aim for 60fps. Given enough time and resources, that's what they'd all end up delivering. Since they are never given enough time or resources, by either management or their publishers, there will be a time when the only option is to drop to 30fps. It has nothing to do with laziness, and everything to do with money.
66. Re:Detail by Troed · 2012-12-19 08:26 · Score: 1
  
  I was a demo coder in the 80s/90s. If you released a demo with effects running at half framerate ("2 VBL", 25/30fps) you got laughed at. Fluid motion was only available at full framerate (288/240p videomodes, "1 VBL", 50/60fps).
  Everyone can perceive the difference between 30 and 60 fps.
  
  --
  it's in my head
67. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 09:03 · Score: 0
  
  The linked article has no citations and reads like an Angelfire page.
  While some of the tests described are reproducible, this hardly qualifies as scientific, so I'm not sure what myth you were trying to disprove here.
  Also, consider that FPS is much more important in, you guessed it, the FPS genre. (Funny coincidence, yes?)
  RPGs, RTS, etc. you will notice anything above 24-30 because there's nothing else to see. You will notice below that because your PC will be chugging and not keeping up.
68. Re:Detail by Trogre · 2012-12-19 09:10 · Score: 1
  
  ...which is why we are okay with 24 & 30 fps for movies/videos.
  No we aren't. While static or slightly moving elements such as people look passable at 24fps I have never, NEVER seen a pan or tilt at that frame rate that didn't blur into a juddery mess. Yet those exact same movies looked absolutely beautiful when the DVD was played through a 100Hz motion-interpolating TV. Why? Because the motion detection created the missing frames and produced an effective 50fps experience.
  The main objection to high frame rate motion is one of conditioning: people are used to seeing low-budget TV shows shot at 50 or 60 interlaced fields per second, giving an effective temporal resolution of 50 or 60fps. The horrible stop-start 24fps motion has come to be associated with high-budget cinema. Therefore when they see a smoother frame rate in a cinema and they perceive it as cheap but don't know why. Ref: the Soap Opera effect.
  The same thing happened with talkies, colour film and the demise of film grain.
  
  --
  "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
69. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 09:12 · Score: 0
  
  You don't play games, do you? If you did, you would know there is a big difference between 30 and 60 fps. The input delay is a very real problem. In the old days of C-64's and Amigas and arcade machines, everything was running at 60fps and games would react to your input instantly (as far as you could tell). Hit a button, a shot is fired. Move the joystick, your avatar moves, instantly. When you go down to 30fps it introduces a delay that you can easily perceive. Things no longer happen as soon as you hit the button. It makes modern console shooters feel very frustrating, like your reaction speed is artificially impaired. Compare the same game running 30fps on a console and 60fps on PC, the difference in how responsive it feels is like night and day.
70. Re:Detail by Trogre · 2012-12-19 09:39 · Score: 1
  
  I'll take lower spatial resolution for more temporal resolution, thanks.
  You might not recall that the original Doom engine was frame-rate locked to, you guessed it, 30fps. When the code was released and tweaked engines came out that barrier was quickly lifted and the game became much better.
  I'll go back to my Sega consoles now.
  
  --
  "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
71. Re:Detail by Pubstar · 2012-12-19 09:58 · Score: 1
  
  Someone doesn't play FPS games competitively. I play better on my 120hz BenQ monitor than my 60hz Samsung. It's the smoothness and speed at which new sprites enter the screen. That .016 might not seem like that much, but if he pops on my screen faster than I do on his, it gives me that much more of an edge on the reaction front. Your argument is invalid.
72. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 12:11 · Score: 0
  
  In other words the problem with his correction was that it was 100% correct.
  Wee dont yuse fenetic speling in eenglish.
73. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 13:19 · Score: 0
  
  What a crock of shit. While some c64 or Amiga games ran at refresh speed, a great deal more did not. Some games were marketed because of refresh speed updates, like Uridium. Amiga most definitely rarely hit refresh speed in games.
74. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 14:06 · Score: 1
  
  - And... a game is not film, and latency matters. A lot. At 30 fps, you need to wait twice the time to see any feedback from your input. In most games you will just train yourself to input the commands in anticipation without even knowing a word about latency, but in action games, where your reaction time matters, latency is a problem. And many other sources of latency add to the sum, such as clumsy 'smart' TVs post-processing your images, or badly engineered 'casual' motion wi-fi controllers.
  
  I got to see an interesting trial of this when working on a racing game, several years ago. Part way through development, we had the game at a stage where we could run at different frame rates, with an accurate model of a real world track, using simplified but tunable car physics. The average hack players like myself didn't have a huge difference in lap times between 30 and 60 fps. The good players though, were able to get much better, and closer to real world, lap times at 60. Those who don't believe in higher frame rates seem to base their views on a faulty analogy based on a simple, blocking change-feedback-response model. Good players appear to be using more of a pipeline approach to their play, noticing a change, and throwing the repsonse to that change into their hand movements while already looking at the game again before the change has propogated through.
  We had to render that game at 30, because of the amount of detail we were contractually obliged to put into the track and car textures. (So much IP rights tied up in all the advertising on cars and tracks!) We ended up with a hybrid model, where the input and physics systems were running at 60, but the graphics and audio were running at 30, effectively only rendering every second frame to screen, with the alternate frames feeding position data to the motion blur shader. It worked, for that game. I wouldn't like to bet on it being a solution to every action game genre.
  I can't tell you the game, due to NDA, but I will say that we got wiped out that Christmas by another racing game that barely held 30fps (dropped frames if you had all the other cars close in front of you) but had really pretty reflections and smooth high poly curves on the cars. We learned our lesson, from then on game play just had to be good enough, the shiny bits have a far better ROI.
75. Re:Detail by rioki · 2012-12-19 21:35 · Score: 1
  
  I think it is rather Blinn's Law at work. The reason why consoles have aimed at 30fps, is because average TVs did and still mostly do not go much higher. What good does it do more frames if your TV displays them at 24fps. Then you just cram more stuff into the frame. For the PC they "aim" at 60fps, but there it is more along the lines of "throw more hardware at it".
76. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 21:36 · Score: 0
  
  The human eye has a maximum threshold for information, and it is less than 24 FPS, so please explain what I am missing for you to claim 'double the detail' is even possible.
77. Re:Detail by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-22 10:11 · Score: 0
  
  Half the detail. Jerky frame rates are pants, and the bigger your TV the more you can perceive the frame rate changes, especially during pans. But even on my old 14" I could still tell when it was 30 or 60.
78. Re:Detail by KIFulgore · 2012-12-26 05:53 · Score: 1
  
  I would rather have half the detail at 60 FPS. I perceive a huge difference in 30 vs 60 FPS, yet I notice very little difference in graphic quality for systems with double the graphics horsepower. For me, faster graphics hardware is producing diminishing returns in visual quality but the framerate is very noticeable.
  
  --
  - For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 18:30 · Score: -1

I just came back from seeing The Hobbit in 48 FPS and I gotta say that sucked really badly. Makes me very happy to see things in the standard 24 FPS by comparison. No need for that crappy higher framerate, which doesn't improve the look of things at all.
1. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by epyT-R · 2012-12-18 18:39 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  people who complain about higher framerates never seem to have a justification other than 'it's not what I'm used to'. What about the 48fps made it suck? Please avoid using 'audiophile-like' subjective/emotional terms.
2. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 18:58 · Score: 0
  
  Erm... he thinks it sucked and you want him to avoid subjective terms? Okay then...
3. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by TubeSteak · 2012-12-18 18:58 · Score: 2
  
  Please avoid using 'audiophile-like' subjective/emotional terms.
  Our expectations & emotional experience colors our subjective experience.
  And it's a scientifically measurable effect.
  That isn't to say objective measures are irrelevant, only that they are not all that is relevant.
  
  --
  [Fuck Beta]
  o0t!
4. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 19:12 · Score: 1
  
  the problem is you don't want to have it as lifelike as real life. The higher fidelity given actually decreases the fantasy of the experience. With movies not set in the real world and out of this world cgi flitting about in massive droves, you don't want to have it 'shown'. You want it painted over, to sort of fudge it to give a better appealing finished product even if it's technically inferior.
5. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 19:36 · Score: 0
  
  Please avoid using 'audiophile-like' subjective/emotional terms.
  
  Our expectations & emotional experience colors our subjective experience.
  Thanks for proving his point!
6. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by epyT-R · 2012-12-18 19:42 · Score: 1
  
  For me the higher framerate helps suspend disbelief because everything moves more fluidly. 24fps always gave me a headache too.
7. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by epyT-R · 2012-12-18 19:55 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Well, there's a bandwagon of snobbery out there about this issue. Kinda like people who say vinyl or vhs is superior to digital audio and video, I suspect this whole 'butt is it art' routine is more about social exclusivity and differentiation (and unhealthy doses of insecurity) than it is about their actual experience. I could understand if someone got motion sickness from the higher rate and didn't like that, but otherwise I cannot understand why someone would want animations deliberately choppy.
  With today's style all about fast cuts and jerkycam, I think the higher framerate would help the viewer track the action.. It helps in games and I suspect it would help me in such scenes, esp when they pile on the blur and urinal tournamint style colored lighting..
8. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by gigaherz · 2012-12-18 19:59 · Score: 2
  
  It's less blurry and doesn't give you headaches, why would ANYONE want watch a movie that's NOT blurry or -- if seen in 3D -- gives you headaches?
  I do agree that it doesn't have the "cinematic" feel of standard movies, so it feels weird when you watch it -- different. But it's so clear, smooth and headache-free that it's worth losing that. In fact, I'd like to see a movie in 60 or 75fps someday.
9. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Tough+Love · 2012-12-18 20:04 · Score: 1
  
  What about the 48fps made it suck?
  The popcorn no doubt.
  
  --
  When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
10. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by SecurityTheatre · 2012-12-18 20:15 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  That's exactly the problem I had.
  The "Jerkycam" works BECAUSE of the 24fps.
  The only time I found the 48fps showing to be uncomfortable and weird was during very fast action, jerky motion sequences. It suddenly feels like high-fidelity jerkyness, which makes it lose its tendency to portray "oh noez, stuff is blurry and out of control, even the camera", and just feels like "why is the dude shaking the camera so much?"
11. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by epyT-R · 2012-12-18 20:25 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  I guess my interpretation of jerkycam was always "why the hell is he shaking the camera so much?" Its' annoying and distracting, especially when it's every other scene. If the sharpness of movement isn't sufficient it's because the movements aren't sharp enough. The lower framerate just hid that.
12. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Chrisq · 2012-12-18 20:47 · Score: 1
  
  people who complain about higher framerates never seem to have a justification other than 'it's not what I'm used to'. What about the 48fps made it suck? Please avoid using 'audiophile-like' subjective/emotional terms.
  I ended up liking it by the end of the film, but the "in your face" realism was quite a shock at first. I went into it thinking that there would not be much difference but movements seem much more abrupt and real, and facial expressions seem more lifelike. I put this down to seeing every micro-expression, each twitch of the eye or slight tremble on a smile. I can see that some people wouldn't like it; probably a "Cal Lightman" would get sick of seeing the expression of fear in seeing an Orc was really hiding an "oh no this is the twenty-third take and I'm getting hungry".
13. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Chrisq · 2012-12-18 20:50 · Score: 1
  
  Oh I should add that there is a big difference between the Hobbit cinema HFR and HD displays that I have seen. I don't know whether this is due to compression of fast moving artefacts or physical persistence in the monitors but it is clearly very different.
14. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by hack++slash · 2012-12-18 21:01 · Score: 2
  
  Stupid AC, movies are not games, in games you want the highest framerate possible because this (usually) means quicker response times from keyboard/mouse/gamepad, increasing the feeling of immersion in the game.
  
  This is especially so with the Oculus Rift type headgear being developed, the less lag between your input and the computer's visual output the more immersed you feel, with movies you're simply an outside observer.
  
  --
  To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
15. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by dosius · 2012-12-18 21:39 · Score: 1
  
  Uncanny valley?
  
  --
  What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
16. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by aaaaaaargh! · 2012-12-18 21:40 · Score: 1
  
  Kinda like people who say vinyl or vhs is superior to digital audio and video, I suspect this whole 'butt is it art' routine is more about social exclusivity and differentiation (and unhealthy doses of insecurity) than it is about their actual experience.
  What's your point? People are sometimes irrational in their choices, and, of course, sociological factors play a role in determining them. Otherwise a large part of high-end markets in all kinds of domains as well as most corporate branding would vanish overnight. Objective measures, e.g. whether people would fail a blind test or not, are fairly irrelevant if people do not consume blindly. The things we are talking about are meant to be interesting and primarily entertaining. Sure, you can spend a decent amount of marketing into "educating" people about what they "should" prefer but the question is whether that money is really well spent if people already have other preferences. Experience always come in one package, including all kinds of "side" factors. There is really no point in tasting wine out of plastic cups or having a gourmet meal in a fast food restaurant.
17. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 22:01 · Score: 0
  
  I even get headaches for 24fps 2D movies. Especially action movies are just a blurry mess, in a movie theatre I could actually see the shutter angle on the camera, where the blurry shapes was intermitedly shown across the screen.
18. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 22:13 · Score: 0
  
  I must humbly say that I disagree. I came back, absolutely loving it, something I can't say about 3D vs 2D. Have you compared the HFR and the normal frame rate Hobbit?
19. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Joce640k · 2012-12-18 22:19 · Score: 1
  
  You might want to put "Uncanny Valley" in quotes and capitalize it so that people don't think you're just posting random words...
  I haven't seen The Hobbit yet so I can't comment but I don't see how it can be worse. Not really. Not unless you were going into the cinema thinking "Oh, I really MUST analyze the frame rate thing down to the last minute detail so I can have an opinion later".
  I bet if it was the other way round, if we'd always had 48fps and Peter Jackson was experimenting with 24fps to give it an "analog" feel, the pseuds would be complaining just as loudly. It's what they do.
  
  --
  No sig today...
20. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 22:24 · Score: 1
  
  It's more like it goes from awesome the lord of the rings put into movie format to 'It looks like my cousin bob after at a LARP'
21. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by simoncpu+was+here · 2012-12-18 22:35 · Score: 2
  
  My subjective reason for hating 48fps: the movie looks like a sitcom.
22. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by bluescrn · 2012-12-18 22:36 · Score: 1
  
  That's because of years of conditioning, your brain just accepts '24fps==cinematic', and it'll take a while to get used to change/improvement.
23. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 23:05 · Score: 0
  
  I don't know how you deal with broadcast TV.
24. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by hattig · 2012-12-18 23:10 · Score: 1
  
  Don't forget that in the movie, each frame is a snapshot over 1/24 (or 1/48 in the case of The Hobbit) of a second, motion blur comes for free.
  In a computer game the motion blur is far harder to perform, and most frames are instantaneous snapshots of a scene. It can be made up for by having a higher framerate.
25. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 00:28 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  That's just conditioning -- you're used to seeing sitcoms in higher framerates than movies. If sitcoms were traditionally filmed in color and movies traditionally filmed in black and white, you'd be ranting about how much color sucks in movies.
26. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Ash+Vince · 2012-12-19 00:38 · Score: 0, Troll
  
  Well, there's a bandwagon of snobbery out there about this issue. Kinda like people who say vinyl or vhs is superior to digital audio and video..
  Apart from in the case of vinyl and cd's you can actually express it easily in physical terms: Due to the CD low frequency cut off being 20hz but record not having one as they store vibrations directly without digitising them. Humans can hear the difference because we can hear frequencies as low as 12hz in ideal conditions and a decent pair of speakers going down to 15hz or so.
  
  --
  I dont read /. to RTFA, I read /. to offend people in ignorance.
27. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by AmiMoJo · 2012-12-19 01:02 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  It's just a way of doing action on the cheap. The special effects and stunts don't have to be as good because no-one can see them clearly. A bit of low budget CGI looks much better when blurred and our of focus and only on the screen for 1/24th of a second.
  Transformers invented a variation where the CGI has so much detail and is frames so poorly on screen that you can't make out where the character's limbs are or what is actually going on anyway, so again it seems to be better than it actually is. If you step through the action sequences frame by frame there is a very clear disconnect between the CGI and real objects that get thrown around by poorly hidden explosives and hydraulics. Terrible camera work hides a multitude of lameness.
  
  --
  const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
  SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
28. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 01:49 · Score: 0
  
  It's also going to take decades before everyone moves on to making films at higher framerates - if they actually do.
29. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 02:27 · Score: 0
  
  As far as I knew, CD's stored audio as PCM at 44,100Hz, using 16 bits. If I were to digitise a 10 Hz sine wave [ a(t) = 32768 * sin (2*pi*t/4410) ], why would a cd be unable to represent that and pass it on to the speakers?
30. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 03:09 · Score: 0
  
  Here's what sucked about 48fps: The higher FPS made all of the real human actors and real scenery look that much more real, which was awesome. You know what wasn't awesome? The CGI trolls and goblins that looked that much more fake in comparison. In other modern fantasy movies, the creatures look just as real as the actors. In 48 FPS, the creatures just look like CGI creatures, no more integrated into the movie's reality than Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
  For an action movie or a drama, the higher realism might have been great, but when fully CGI creatures need to look just as real as the actors, the CGI just couldn't keep up.
31. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 03:22 · Score: 0
  
  Higher resolution requires higher fidelity. The brain fills the gaps when you see something in black and white, low resolution, or 24 fps. There is nothing in the 48fps version that was not wrong already in the 24fps one, but now the faults are much more apparent.
  You can read past most of the complaints and see they are into this area. People are complaining that CGI is badly integrated, sets look fake, or make-up looks plastic. We had similar complaints when we went color or HD, and they are valid. We just need to do better.
32. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Holi · 2012-12-19 04:28 · Score: 1
  
  He can't use subjective terms when describing his opinion? yeah, thats a brilliant demand.
  
  --
  Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
33. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Tarlus · 2012-12-19 04:37 · Score: 1
  
  I think I heard it best stated like this: It looks so realistic, you can see how fake it is.
  
  --
  /* No Comment */
34. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Tarlus · 2012-12-19 04:42 · Score: 1
  
  I put this down to seeing every micro-expression, each twitch of the eye or slight tremble on a smile.
  I agree. It's a new layer of realism that we're just not used to. It's similar to watching a Blu-ray at 1080p for the first time and being rather displeased by the sight of every pore, freckle and mole that you otherwise wouldn't notice on actors.
  
  --
  /* No Comment */
35. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Tarlus · 2012-12-19 04:45 · Score: 1
  
  It was really easy to tell the puppets apart from the CGI. I was actually disappointed by how reliant they were on CGI for the antagonists, especially given how awesome the the masks and makeup looked in the LotR films.
  
  --
  /* No Comment */
36. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by lister+king+of+smeg · 2012-12-19 05:25 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  The real question is why are you expecting quality from transforms?
  
  --
  ---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
37. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by robthebloke · 2012-12-19 07:36 · Score: 1
  
  I must admit, the first time I saw raw 48fps footage, it looked super odd. After a while of staring at the same sequence, I realised it's because there was no motion blur on the frames, only that which you see with your own eyes. The lack of motion blur made the sequences look more like a computer game than a film. As someone who moved from the games industry to VFX, it was kinda nice to know that the games I worked on in the past, actually looked a lot more realistic than I'd given them credit at the time. I find it slightly ironic that the games industry has been chasing the 'photoreal' quality of film (by added motion blur etc), and yet a simple technology change in the VFX world has shown that computer games had actually more photorealistic all along....
38. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 09:03 · Score: 0
  
  You got that exactly backwards.
  vinyl *needs* a low frequency cutoff (rumble filter).
  A decent CD playback system can reproduce down to a few Hz, really only limited by how big you make signal AC coupling caps.
39. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Luckyo · 2012-12-19 09:58 · Score: 1
  
  The problem is the same as with shift to 1080p. Many methods used when filming were originally designed for low res, low frame rate films. As a result, stuff like caked makeup and skin problems on actors became visible forcing significant method changes for 1080p, and same is likely going to be needed to make 48fps to look "as reasonable" as 24fps looked. That is things like special effects and such which are known to fall flat in very annoying ways because the methods behind them rely on frame rates being low enough to obfuscate the problems, just low low res obfuscated caked makeup and skin problems.
40. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Pseudonym · 2012-12-19 11:49 · Score: 1
  
  I just came back from seeing The Hobbit in 48 FPS and I gotta say that sucked really badly.
  The suck to which you refer had nothing to do with the framerate, dude.
  
  --
  sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
41. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Pseudonym · 2012-12-19 11:51 · Score: 1
  
  The pores and freckles don't bother me. I can see those on the big screen, after all. The thing that bugs me about blu-ray is that I can see all the MPEG compression noise, especially in animated films.
  Until the compressors get better, I'm not getting a blu-ray player.
  
  --
  sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
42. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-21 06:24 · Score: 0
  
  I believe some people must not notice it. I haven't watched a 48fps movie, but I have a tv with the motion plus motion plus
  It cause the "Soap Opera Effect," which my girlfriend doesn't notice, but I do and it bugs the hell out of me. Basically the picture just doesn't look "right". It looks cheap and crappy like a soap opera. For me, the audio and acting even seem to be affected - it sounds more hollow and the acting seems to be more stiff - I'm guessing this effect is some kind of illusion caused by my brain or something.
  I suppose its possible that I could get used to this, and switching the motion plus off would cause the same reaction, but I haven't tried it. Its also possible that content shot in 48fps looks better than content that wasn't and has this motion plus treatment added.
  I am far from being an audiophile or videophile or any kind of phile. I can't describe it objectively. I don't know the technical terms to describe its suckiness. I just know that it is really disturbing to watch. Some people get sick when watching video games, or those video rides (star tours, harry potter, etc.) Maybe its a similar kind of thing.
  Have you watched the 48fps Hobbit? If you didn't notice anything off about it, good for you. Do you have one of these HDTV's with the motion plus stuff? Don't notice? Cool. But the googles are full of people who really can't stand it.
43. Re:HOBBIT IN 48 FPS - YECHH! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-21 11:03 · Score: 0
  
  But the lower framerates have that warm, analog glow!
big leap by RedHackTea · 2012-12-18 18:38 · Score: 1

Why the big jump from 30 to 60? How about you target 35 fps or 40 fps?

The most unnerving part about the article:
"...30 frames per second could also mean many displays of future console games will also come in at a resolution of 720p."

I predict the next posts to be about FPS standing for Fraps Per Second.

--
The G
1. Re:big leap by epyT-R · 2012-12-18 18:46 · Score: 1
  
  because 35 or 40 isn't an even multiple of 60, so you get tearing and juddering.
2. Re:big leap by Nyder · 2012-12-18 18:55 · Score: 1
  
  Why the big jump from 30 to 60? How about you target 35 fps or 40 fps? ....
  LCD monitors and TV's tend to update the screen at 60 frames per sec. That is 60hz. While 30 is okay, because it goes evenly into 60, 60 is optimal because the framerate and the screen refresh (update) happend at the same time.
  
  --
  Be seeing you...
lack of proper triple buffering by stanjo74 · 2012-12-18 18:42 · Score: 4, Informative

Neither DirectX nor OpenGL support proper triple buffering to avoid tearing at variable frame rates. Because of that, if you want tear-free rendering, but cannot keep up at 60 fps all the time, you must render at 30 fps or 15 fps, but not, say 48 or 56 fps. You can render at any variable frame rate if you allow for tearing (which most games do and avoid the headache of v-sychs altogether).
1. Re:lack of proper triple buffering by AmiMoJo · 2012-12-19 01:06 · Score: 1
  
  You don't need tripple buffering to avoid variable frame rates, you just need variable levels of detail. Rage does exactly that. As it works through the scene it has a time budget for rendering different things, and if drops detail when it notices that it is behind. It works really well, the main complaint being that sometimes it is a bit too pessimistic and drops the detail level lower than it really needs to.
  
  --
  const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
  SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
2. Re:lack of proper triple buffering by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 09:14 · Score: 0
  
  Wrong. Rage determines if it's behind by the time it took to render the *previous* frame.
  Worse, they tuned the control loop wrong. Resulting in varying frame detail in a sawtooth-like pattern.
  Easily verifiable in high-speed captures.
3. Re:lack of proper triple buffering by GuB-42 · 2012-12-20 04:07 · Score: 1
  
  From John Carmack's twitter : "Triple buffering adds latency and jitter; it should be avoided. The Answer is non-isochronous display updates."
  What Carmack uses in RAGE is : sync at 60Hz but allow tearing if the game cannot keep up. This is relatively new in the PC world and drivers have to support it.
Oh Carmack... by readnotpost · 2012-12-18 18:42 · Score: 0, Troll

Sounds like Carmack is still more interested in targeting woefully outclassed console hardware instead than cutting out an impressive PC-level engine for a change, particularly since Steam has shown there's significant life and popularity (and money to be made) on PCs still. But no, he prefers to target the lowest-common denominator of hardware. Not quite the philosophy of the iD software I grew up with.
1. Re:Oh Carmack... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 19:04 · Score: 0
  
  Id hasn't made a good game in over a decade amd they're totally outclassed on the technical end.
2. Re:Oh Carmack... by thetoadwarrior · 2012-12-18 19:40 · Score: -1, Troll
  
  PC gamers should have paid for their software more often if they wanted dev's attention.
3. Re:Oh Carmack... by bemymonkey · 2012-12-18 20:52 · Score: 1
  
  Now why would you want to keep that upgrade treadmill running? I for one quite enjoy the fact that I can play many of the latest games on a $100 video card and can focus on efficiency (just bought a Radeon 7750, which doesn't even need an additional power connector) instead of brute force... And the games look great. Does Battlefield 3 (the first PC game I've played that nearly *requires* a quad-core to run well) really look better than, say, Call of Duty MW3? MW3 feels like it needs about half the processing power that BF3 does, but visually, the difference is pretty minimal.
  Am I missing something big here? Hell, I must be... I'm still gaming on a Core 2 Quad :p
4. Re:Oh Carmack... by Elbart · 2012-12-18 21:02 · Score: 1
  
  *snore*
5. Re:Oh Carmack... by Mashiki · 2012-12-19 00:12 · Score: 1
  
  PC gamers should have paid for their software more often if they wanted dev's attention.
  Oh, hey there troll. I guess you missed the part that PC gaming will be outselling the entire console industry by the first quarter of next year.
  Never mind that piracy is rampant on consoles, so rampant that it makes the stuff on PC's look like kids stuff. But hey, what do us elitist PC gamers know. Oh I know what we know, the industry has turned from "taking risks" to "taking no risks."
  
  --
  Om, nomnomnom...
6. Re:Oh Carmack... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 01:13 · Score: 1
  
  LOL, the consoles that are coming out in 2013 are not woefully outclassed by PCs.
7. Re:Oh Carmack... by CronoCloud · 2012-12-19 02:37 · Score: 1
  
  He's not a troll, PC piracy rates are insanely high much higher than console rates, especially in Eastern Europe, second-world and third world countries.
  
  I guess you missed the part that PC gaming will be outselling the entire console industry by the first quarter of next year.
  Define outselling...if you mean "making more money" that's almost entirely due to MMO subscriptions, not single player game sales.
8. Re:Oh Carmack... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 05:29 · Score: 0
  
  Now why would you want to keep that upgrade treadmill running? I for one quite enjoy the fact that I can play many of the latest games on a $100 video card and can focus on efficiency (just bought a Radeon 7750, which doesn't even need an additional power connector) instead of brute force... And the games look great. Does Battlefield 3 (the first PC game I've played that nearly *requires* a quad-core to run well) really look better than, say, Call of Duty MW3? MW3 feels like it needs about half the processing power that BF3 does, but visually, the difference is pretty minimal.
  Am I missing something big here? Hell, I must be... I'm still gaming on a Core 2 Quad :p
  Yes, this conversation is about consoles which are less powerful than the computer you self described as "low end" for gaming.
  The controversy is that TFS implied the next generation of console games was not going to improve upon the current generation in frame-rates even though the next-gen hardware is expected to be capable of improvement. The argument is between people who think the status quoe for consoles is adequate and people (usually PC gamers who are used to better) who say it is not adequate.
9. Re:Oh Carmack... by thetoadwarrior · 2012-12-19 13:44 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah that's why most PC developers jumped ship and plenty of indies complain about piracy rates as high as 80-90% despite the fact their games only cost a couple bucks or in one case you could set the price so a lot of people couldn't even be bothered to give like $0.50,
  
  Maybe it will be outselling consoles but the fact it has to reach that point despite there being *way* more PCs in the home than consoles tells you a lot.
pthf! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 18:43 · Score: 0

60 fps is a waste of space and bandwidth.
Fixed Refresh Rates by bazald · 2012-12-18 18:48 · Score: 4, Insightful

A display (television or monitor) has a fixed refresh rate. Assuming vertical synchronization is turned on to avoid tearing, you're pretty much limited to a framerate which evenly divides into the true refresh rate of the display. If the refresh rate is 60 fps, possible targets include 60 frames per second (providing 16.7 ms of computation time per frame), 30 FPS (providing 33.3 ms of computation time per frame), 15 FPS (providing 66.7 ms of computation time per frame), and so on. Anything below 30 FPS is kind of a joke, so nobody reputable would consider allowing more than 33 ms computation per frame in a shipping game.

--
Insert self-referential sig here.
1. Re:Fixed Refresh Rates by stanjo74 · 2012-12-18 18:57 · Score: 2
  
  Unless, you use a technique called "triple buffering", in which case you can have tear-free variable frame rate at any rate. Unfortunately, none of the major 3D APIs have provisions for this. I always wondered why such a fundamental omission for a graphics rendering API.
2. Re:Fixed Refresh Rates by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 19:29 · Score: 0
  
  What are you talking about? You need support from the game, of course, but you can implement triple buffering in both OpenGL and Direct3D fairly easily.
3. Re:Fixed Refresh Rates by stanjo74 · 2012-12-18 19:33 · Score: 1
  
  Have you actually done vsynced triple buffering with OpenGL or DirectX or it just seems to you it ought to be doable?
4. Re:Fixed Refresh Rates by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 19:57 · Score: 0
  
  Lots of games have a triple-buffering option, even some I own from the 20th century. Nvidia, at least, also has an option to force it in on in the control panel.
5. Re:Fixed Refresh Rates by Brulath · 2012-12-18 20:00 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  TechReport analysed the nVidia 680 a bit after its release and had a piece on adaptive vsync which should answer your question.
  Quoted from an nVidia software engineer:
  
  There are two definitions for triple buffering. One applies to OGL and the other to DX. Adaptive v-sync provides benefits in terms of power savings and smoothness relative to both.
  - Triple buffering solutions require more frame-buffer memory than double buffering, which can be a problem at high resolutions.
  - Triple buffering is an application choice (no driver override in DX) and is not frequently supported.
  - OGL triple buffering: The GPU renders frames as fast as it can (equivalent to v-sync off) and the most recently completed frame is display at the next v-sync. This means you get tear-free rendering, but entire frames are affectively dropped (never displayed) so smoothness is severely compromised and the effective time interval between successive displayed frames can vary by a factor of two. Measuring fps in this case will return the v-sync off frame rate which is meaningless when some frames are not displayed (can you be sure they were actually rendered?). To summarize- this implementation combines high power consumption and uneven motion sampling for a poor user experience.
  - DX triple buffering is the same as double buffering but with three back buffers which allows the GPU to render two frames before stalling for display to complete scanout of the oldest frame. The resulting behavior is the same as adaptive vsync (or regular double-buffered v-sync=on) for frame rates above 60Hz, so power and smoothness are ok. It's a different story when the frame rate drops below 60 though. Below 60Hz this solution will run faster than 30Hz (i.e. better than regular double buffered v-sync=on) because successive frames will display after either 1 or 2 v-blank intervals. This results in better average frame rates, but the samples are uneven and smoothness is compromised.
  - Adaptive vsync is smooth below 60Hz (even samples) and uses less power above 60Hz.
  - Triple buffering adds 50% more latency to the rendering pipeline. This is particularly problematic below 60fps. Adaptive vsync adds no latency.
  So triple buffering is bad because it could cause an intermediary frame to be dropped, resulting in a small visual stutter despite being 60fps. There's a video of adaptive vsync on YouTube.
6. Re:Fixed Refresh Rates by stanjo74 · 2012-12-18 20:29 · Score: 2
  
  http://www.anandtech.com/show/2794 "So, this article is as much for gamers as it is for developers. If you are implementing render ahead (aka a flip queue), please don't call it "triple buffering," as that should be reserved for the technique we've described here in order to cut down on the confusion. There are games out there that list triple buffering as an option when the technique used is actually a short render queue. We do realize that this can cause confusion, and we very much hope that this article and discussion help to alleviate this problem."
7. Re:Fixed Refresh Rates by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 20:53 · Score: 0
  
  OK, but the only time you'd need to drop old frames is when you're already rendering much faster than the display can handle. So while the claim may be true, it's not particularly useful; anyone running a game fast enough to sustain 60fps with vsync on can just disable triple-buffering.
8. Re:Fixed Refresh Rates by Xest · 2012-12-18 21:12 · Score: 1
  
  But is that mindset still even relevant now?
  The days of monitors/TVs having refresh rates that were multiples of 15, or 30 or whatever seem to have gone out the door with CRT technology.
9. Re:Fixed Refresh Rates by stanjo74 · 2012-12-18 21:13 · Score: 1
  
  Triple-buffering with vsync allows to decouple the frame rate of the renderer from that of the presenter.
  Your rendering is slightly slower then 60 fps, say 58 fps. With double-buffering with vsync you have to present at 30 fps. With proper triple-buffering with vsync you can present at 58 fps.
  Most games don't care about vsync and will present at the rate of the renderer, causing mid-frame tearing. If you're lucky, the tearing will occur on the top of bottom of the frame and won't be too bad.
  Triple-buffering allows to present at the rate of the renderer or presenter, whichever is lesser, AND with vsync without tearing.
10. Re:Fixed Refresh Rates by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 22:28 · Score: 0
  
  Other way around. CRT technology was very flexible, allowing you to pick 85Hz, 80Hz, 75Hz, even 72Hz or whatever you liked as long as your monitor could go that high. With CRT the only major reasons multiples were desirable (that I can think of) were that a lower FPS device could display a higher FPS sequence simply by skipping every second frame, and a higher FPS device could display a lower FPS sequence of frames evenly.
11. Re:Fixed Refresh Rates by Ottibus · 2012-12-18 22:30 · Score: 1
  
  But the vsync rate is still 60Hz, so if you don't display 60 different frames each second you are not going to get smooth motion. If you generate 58 fps with an even spacing you will get a noticeable 2Hz alias signal because every 30 frames you will get a duplicate rather than a new frame. In practice there will probably be enough jitter in the 58 Hz signal that the alias will become noisy and will be less noticeable.
12. Re:Fixed Refresh Rates by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 01:09 · Score: 0
  
  A display (television or monitor) has a fixed refresh rate
  CRTs can have variable refresh rate; I own one that multisyncs to anything from 50Hz to 85Hz.
  LCDs are scanned out in the same way so I don't see a technical reason they can't support variable framerates too. A quick Google shows that some do support this.
  Despite the theoretical juddering, many games (esp. top-down games) can benefit from non-integer multiples of the base refresh rate (i.e. triple-buffering). I implemented this for a PS3 game earlier this year, and it was fine at 40FPS on a 60Hz display. First person shooters not so much.
Next Gen? by mjwx · 2012-12-18 18:49 · Score: 1, Insightful

So next years consoles are going to be inferior to last years PC? Personally I think between PC and mobile, the console is doomed. This will never happen with iDevices but Android tablets already support HDMI out and input from bluetooth controllers. All we need is for them to get a bit more powerful (Nvidia is advertising a 6 fold power increase between Tegra 2 and Tegra 3) and a method of transfering large games (SD card) and they will become plugin replacements for consoles.

As for real cutting edge games, these never left the PC because it was the only platform that could be counted on to increase in processing power.

Consoles were never about power, they were about the money. Carmack should know that. Casual games are now the big earners. This does not mean that traditional cutting edge games have no place, they're earning better than ever but it's still chicken feed compared to casual.

Console developers will follow the money, which is on mobile and cutting edge developers will concentrate on PC. Traditional Consoles are left with first party developers which wont cut it. Even Nintendo with it's Mario and Zelda cash cows would struggle if it doesn't adapt (I.E. release a tablet/console hybrid. They're half way there with the Wii U).

--
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
1. Re:Next Gen? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 19:25 · Score: 0
  
  Actually, this already happened. Mobile is eating away the handheld console market. The PSVita (built mostly from mobile parts) is essentially dead in the water. The 3DS, a more innovative product which tries hard not to be an iPod with a pad, fares better, but is still a failure compared to Nintendo expectations or the previous generation.
  Android (tablets specially) are an abysmal market for games. Piracy rates are close to 100%, and people have been trained to pay little to nothing for games and value them as such. Considering there are now much more units out there compared to iDevices, app revenue is much worse. And iOS is a bloody arena. Everybody wants to hear Angry Birds stories, but 95% of the games in the mobile app stores are not breaking even (and we're not talking about million-dollar investments, but hobby affairs and two-people startups working for a few months).
  Even then, no, the money is not in mobile. Rovio making $100 million a year sounds great to John Doe, but that is peanuts. You need more than that just to develop a top console game, and five to ten times the number to market it. A single top franchise such as Call of Duty generates more revenue than the entire mobile game industry combined. Of course, this can change. Just as the handheld consoles are going the way of the dodo, tablets, Android TVs or OUYAs could eat away the traditional console market. You may think this would make Call of Duty cost $3.99, and you'll get thousands of great games a month with Linux dominating your living room, but the actual reality will be more in the lines of millions of crap games worth zero and another '82 videogame crisis.
2. Re:Next Gen? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 19:48 · Score: 0
  
  The Call of Duty franchise made $500 million on the first day of its last 2 iterations. If casual games are the big earners as you say, could you tell me which casual games make that kind of money?
  Sure, casual games sell more copies, but at $1 a throw, they are far from overtaking console titles. Console games earn chicken feed? Really?
3. Re:Next Gen? by feepness · 2012-12-18 19:56 · Score: 0
  
  With PC sales plunging 20% and Windows 8 considered a failure, I don't think PC is where the money is headed. Valve itself is making a set-top box because they see the writing on the wall.
4. Re:Next Gen? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 20:50 · Score: 0
  
  Console developers will follow the money
  They already had, that's why they develop on consoles.
5. Re:Next Gen? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 21:07 · Score: 0
  
  The Call of Duty franchise made $500 million on the first day of its last 2 iterations. If casual games are the big earners as you say, could you tell me which casual games make that kind of money?
  Call of Duty.
6. Re:Next Gen? by Tagged_84 · 2012-12-18 21:22 · Score: 1
  
  You do realize that Nvidia offering a 6 fold increase is because it isn't anywhere near up to par with comparable hardware on the market? But I too foresee the death of consoles, down to a niche like the custom built desktop.
7. Re:Next Gen? by Hitokiri+Battousai · 2012-12-18 21:40 · Score: 1
  
  What you describe has already been made and is almost ready to ship. It's called the Ouya.
8. Re:Next Gen? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 22:19 · Score: 0
  
  "Nvidia is advertising a 6 fold power increase between Tegra 2 and Tegra 3"
  Nvdia always selling smoke with his Tegra. Then the reality is another thing.
9. Re:Next Gen? by tofarr · 2012-12-19 03:51 · Score: 1
  
  I think the predictions of the death of consoles may be a bit premature. A console is merely a walled garden similar to that provided with IOS, but without the portability. So long as there is a place for televisions as a large, immersive non mobile media experience, there will be consoles.
10. Re:Next Gen? by Mordermi · 2012-12-19 04:25 · Score: 1
  
  Note: Developers will still aim for 30fps. That does not mean that the consoles will be inferior or only able to handle 30fps. I think it's more about developers being lazy, not an issue with what the hardware can handle. The hardware specs have yet to be releases for next gen consoles, so one can only guess what they will be. Maybe they will be superior to current PCs. Very unlikely, but you never know.
  Also, I highly doubt mobile devices take over consoles any time soon. Why would I buy a tablet for more than three times the cost of a console to replace a console? Not to mention the lack of power in most tablets.
11. Re:Next Gen? by geekbastard · 2012-12-19 08:39 · Score: 1
  
  (Nvidia is advertising a 6 fold power increase between Tegra 2 and Tegra 3)
  
  I think you mean between Tegra 3 and Tegra 4
bizN4tch by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 18:54 · Score: -1

had 3ecome like of programming
Much ado about a single tweet by dirtyhippie · 2012-12-18 19:35 · Score: 3, Insightful

Good lord, this entire article is based on one tweet - 107 characters. Surely we could have waited for Carmack to say something more detailed than this??
1. Re:Much ado about a single tweet by Crypto+Gnome · 2012-12-18 22:51 · Score: 1
  
  In the beginning was The Word.
  
  Now some would say Grease Is The Word, others claim The Bird is The Word.
  
  --
  Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
2. Re:Much ado about a single tweet by Crypto+Gnome · 2012-12-18 22:52 · Score: 1
  
  Also:
  
  Good lord, this entire article is based on one tweet - 107 characters. Surely we could have waited for Carmack to say something more detailed than this??
  THIS!
  
  --
  Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
3. Re:Much ado about a single tweet by Crypto+Gnome · 2012-12-18 22:57 · Score: 1
  
  Also: for those with excessively large Slashdot IDs:
  
  Oh! (OH!)
  Yo! Pretty ladies around the world,
  Got a weird thing to show you, so tell all the boys and girls.
  Tell your brother, your sister, and your ma-mma too,
  'Cause we're about to throw down and you'll know just what to do.
  Wave your hands in the air like you don't care.
  Glide by the people as they start to look and stare.
  Do your dance, do your dance, do your dance quick,
  Ma-mma, c'mon baby, tell me what's the word?
  
  Ah word up!
  
  Everybody say,
  When you hear the call,
  You've got to get it underway.
  
  Word up!
  
  It's the code word,
  No matter where you say it, you'll know that you'll be heard.
  
  WordUP!
  
  --
  Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
4. Re:Much ado about a single tweet by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 04:58 · Score: 0
  
  You know what, moron?
5. Re:Much ado about a single tweet by SuricouRaven · 2012-12-19 08:31 · Score: 1
  
  Welcome to the social web.
6. Re:Much ado about a single tweet by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 10:57 · Score: 0
  
  float ISR (float x){float xhalf = 0.5f*x; int i = *(int*) i = 0x5f3759df - (i>>1); x = *(float*) x = x*(1.5f - xhalf*x*x); return x;}
  Hmm, that just fits in a tweet.
Same as PC. But you can still go for 60. by Sarusa · 2012-12-18 20:02 · Score: 3, Insightful

It's a given that most will target 30fps since more shinies looks better in screenshots and youtube videos than 60fps does. And most consumers can't tell the difference until put a 60 and 30 fps version side by side and let them play.
The leaked/rumored PS4/XNext specs show them as equivalent or slightly weaker than current mid-high gaming PCs, and those can't do 60 fps locked on all the recent shiny games at 1920x1080 with all effects on (except those like CoD MP that specifically target it), so it's unlikely the consoles would. Cheap components is the driver, especially for PS4.
But there's no reason a fighting game or fps can't aim for 60fps on the new gen if it wants to. Use your shaders and effects wisely and no problem.
1. Re:Same as PC. But you can still go for 60. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-18 22:27 · Score: 0
  
  Once hardware is put into a console it automatically becomes much more powerful because games will target the exact configuration of hardware in the console. On PCs you have to work on all hardware - on consoles you only have to work on that exact configuration.
2. Re:Same as PC. But you can still go for 60. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-20 02:43 · Score: 0
  
  Given the trend of current gen consoles rendering at 540p or 600p instead of 720p actual, I'd expect the next gen to either stick to 720 and go for effects, or some balance like 1600x900 with AA off.
  A 650ti can run anything modern at 60fps on a single screen with AA off. And sitting a TV's distance away you cant see jaggies anyway....
News Flash! by Moof123 · 2012-12-18 22:11 · Score: 1, Insightful

Game play still is more important than FPS, see: RAGE.
A good game with low FPS is tragic, but a lame game at even the highest FPS still just sucks.
1. Re:News Flash! by Rockoon · 2012-12-19 00:23 · Score: 1
  
  A better observation is that when a good game has low FPS, its disappointing but the hardware will catch up making for a nice legacy that is talked about for years (will it play Crysis?)
  
  --
  "His name was James Damore."
2. Re:News Flash! by jandrese · 2012-12-19 04:31 · Score: 1
  
  IMHO, Rage was a fun game, with a lot more driving segments than I expected in your normal FPS. Ammo was pretty scarce but I always had enough to get by. I'm still not sure why everybody seemed to hate it. Was it the lack of chest high walls?
  
  --
  
  I read the internet for the articles.
3. Re:News Flash! by Shagg · 2012-12-19 07:45 · Score: 1
  
  I thought Rage was meant to be a demo of their new engine. The point of it was to show off the engine, not necessarily show off the "game" itself.
  
  --
  Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
4. Re:News Flash! by jandrese · 2012-12-19 07:52 · Score: 1
  
  People say that of every id game. Oh no, it's just a shooter, basically a tech demo for id. Sure the story wasn't exactly deep, but that's not why I buy an id game, I don't need some elaborate justification to go down and shoot up a bunch of gross sewer mutants.
  
  --
  
  I read the internet for the articles.
5. Re:News Flash! by Shagg · 2012-12-19 08:17 · Score: 1
  
  Isn't that because what id develops these days are engines that other people use to make games? Where do they make the majority of their money... game sales, or engine licensing?
  
  --
  Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
6. Re:News Flash! by jandrese · 2012-12-19 10:30 · Score: 1
  
  Not anymore. The engine they built for Rage is only for Bethesda (their parent company) games. If you want to license an engine for a FPS you're probably going to look at something like the Unreal engine.
  
  --
  
  I read the internet for the articles.
7. Re:News Flash! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 16:08 · Score: 0
  
  Isn't that because what id develops these days are engines that other people use to make games?
  That's the meme. The reality is that id conceded most of the game engine market a long, long time ago. If you want to be serious about selling your engine to other companies, you need to be serious about creating polished documentation and content creation tools as well as providing technical and engineering support. id never seemed interested in dedicating employees to those activities, so it wasn't long before UnrealEngine (whose parent company was interested in doing that kind of thing) took most of the market.
  Basically, id software liked keeping their own company sized as a single content team and a single coding team focused on id's own games. Engine licensing was a distraction and they didn't pursue it as hard as most people assume.
  As others have noted, idTech licensing is also a thing of the past. idTech engines are now id/Bethesda only. (Though I'd think they'd make exceptions for any id properties developed by Raven Software -- lots of "id" games were farmed out to Raven over the years, precisely because id was kept too small to work on multiple major games at a time. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Raven accounted for much of the licensing of idTech engines.)
In which case you're going to have to explain... by Viol8 · 2012-12-19 00:07 · Score: 1

... how old style arcade games running on 50/60Hz interlaced CRTs managed to produce smooth flicker free motion?
Re:In which case you're going to have to explain.. by tepples · 2012-12-19 00:53 · Score: 1

Old-style arcade games and every game console prior to the Dreamcast forced the interlaced CRTs into a non-standard progressive mode called 240p by the retro-gaming community. And though the scrolling on these was at 60 Hz, the actual sprite animation was occasionally as low as 8 Hz because old 2D raster graphics systems didn't support real-time inbetweening of sprite cels.
I'm a single player gamer. by AbRASiON · 2012-12-19 01:04 · Score: 1

I couldn't care less about 60 fps unless I was playing a twitchy FPS or a racing game - both of which I play very, very rarely.
Uncharted, God of War, Okami HD, Darksiders, Journey, Mass Effect, Enslaved, Pixel Junk Monsters, Heavy Rain, LA Noire, GTA4 / 5, Half Life, Ico and SOTC HD, Portal.
None of these games NEED 60fps - they all look nice with a consistent 30 and 60 wouldn't hurt but I'd rather graphical fidelity than frame rate. ESPECIALLY with the law of diminishing returns kicking in to full effect this generation.
You fire up the top 10 graphical powerhouse games onthe PS3 and 360 right now and guess what? They still look pretty damn good. Some of them exceptionally good.
I'm convinced these new consoles are still coming 12 to 24 months too soon. So the last thing we need is only a mild bump in graphical fidelity and more frames. We need all the fidelity we can get.
1. Re:I'm a single player gamer. by Mordermi · 2012-12-19 04:43 · Score: 1
  
  I agree with this. The games I play all look great and I enjoy the game. Heavy Rain looked amazing. Have you seen trailers for Last of Us? It looks great. The main thing for me is gameplay.
2. Re:I'm a single player gamer. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 05:58 · Score: 0
  
  I could care less
  FTFY. Lot of people don't understand that the expression is "I could care less" when trying to express that you don't care about it at all.
3. Re:I'm a single player gamer. by AbRASiON · 2012-12-19 17:26 · Score: 1
  
  I can't tell if this post is a joke, sarcastic or epically stupid?? I guess excellent troll?
4. Re:I'm a single player gamer. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-20 10:25 · Score: 0
  
  Correction fail.
  Imagine a piece of paper. Put a zero on the bottom. This represents not caring at all. Put an infinity sign at the top. This represents caring so much you'd take a bullet for the cause. Draw a line between representing the gradient. Assume you are on the zero mark on this line: you don't care at all. Should you say "I could care less" or "I couldn't care less" to express how you feel?
  THE WRONG WAY: If you say "I could care less", there must be space below you. You're saying you can't be at the zero, which isn't what you meant at all. In fact, it leaves open the possibility that you're willing to take a bullet!
  THE (sort of) RIGHT WAY: If you say "I couldn't care less", that says there is nothing below you on the gradient, which implies you are at the zero mark. You could not possibly care any less, meaning you don't care at all.
  Now, I say it's only sorta right because one might argue that "couldn't care less" can be used as an expression of something like "I am so passionate I cannot imagine a reality in which I care less". However, people who care about things seldom choose to use tricky, ironic, or ambiguous language to express their heartfelt feelings, so in practice "couldn't care less" works reasonably well as a way of saying you don't care.
  There is no way to make "could care less" work, though. It says "I do care", in a lukewarm way, and if it's clear from context that you actually meant "I don't care" it also says "I am a dunce". Probably not what you were going for!
Anyone heard about Nyquist? by Ateocinico · 2012-12-19 01:19 · Score: 1

Regarding all the ignorance about “perception” above 30Hz, I can give you a counter proof. In the CRT times, the Swedish health standards called for refresh rates of 25Hz above the electric facility frequency (60Hz in the USA) , so that the peripheral retina, which is it's fastest part, could not notice it. That prevented eyestrain. From the other posts that talk about the “myth” that you can notice something above 100Hz or cite friends that have the “impression that” , it can be inferred that a greater background in sciences is needed.
They're accustomed to vinyl's distortions by tepples · 2012-12-19 01:42 · Score: 1

Why do people complain about the lack of "warmth" in a CD versus vinyl?
Because they're accustomed to vinyl's distortions, such as groove noise and an overall loss of highs, combined with the different behavior of level compression caused by vinyl's New Orthophonic preemphasis curve. It's the same thing causing people to say The Hobbit looks like a soap opera at 48 fps: they associate 48 fps with storytelling conventions used in soap operas.
Re:In which case you're going to have to explain.. by Viol8 · 2012-12-19 01:43 · Score: 1

"Old-style arcade games and every game console prior to the Dreamcast forced the interlaced CRTs into a non-standard progressive mode called 240p"
240 frames progessive? I doubt that - the CRT hardware couldn't have done it. Did you mean 24 frames? Even if you did , CRT TV sets receiving a signal through the RF input would have still have been doing 50/60hz refresh.
KB+M, multiplayer, no lag: pick two by tepples · 2012-12-19 01:49 · Score: 4, Insightful

using a controller, playing a lot of single player games
You can have a mouse and keyboard. You can have multiplayer. You can have no lag. But you can't have them all. Mouse and keyboard + multiplayer = online PC game with net lag. Mouse and keyboard + no lag = single-player PC game. Multiplayer + no net lag = same-screen multiplayer game with gamepads.
1. Re:KB+M, multiplayer, no lag: pick two by Hatta · 2012-12-19 02:48 · Score: 2
  
  That's what LANs are for.
  
  --
  Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
2. Re:KB+M, multiplayer, no lag: pick two by dywolf · 2012-12-19 06:36 · Score: 1
  
  Because there are absolutely no one that plays on LANs.
  Oh wait...
  or
  Because no one has hacked together a keyboard+mouse controller for game consoles. Ever.
  Oh wait: http://www.penguinunited.com/ and http://www.mayflash.com/
  
  --
  The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
3. Re:KB+M, multiplayer, no lag: pick two by tepples · 2012-12-19 07:47 · Score: 1
  
  Because there are absolutely no one that plays on LANs.
  Please see my reply to Hatta.
  
  Oh wait: http://www.penguinunited.com/
  
  These devices are far from common, and game developers can't rely on their being present.
  
  and http://www.mayflash.com/
  
  Most of the products on the front page of mayflash.com appear to be devices to use console controllers with a PC, not vice versa. Digging deeper, I did notice the Max Shooter Pro, and I wonder how it works around the cryptographic handshake between the Xbox 360 and authentic controllers.
Re:In which case you're going to have to explain.. by damien_kane · 2012-12-19 02:27 · Score: 1

"Old-style arcade games and every game console prior to the Dreamcast forced the interlaced CRTs into a non-standard progressive mode called 240p"
240 frames progessive? I doubt that - the CRT hardware couldn't have done it. Did you mean 24 frames? Even if you did , CRT TV sets receiving a signal through the RF input would have still have been doing 50/60hz refresh.
240p is 240fps just as much as 1080p is 1080fps, i.e. not at all.
240p means a 240-line image, progressively scanned (i.e. full-frame, instead of interlaced half-frame scans).
Take a look here, and be informed.
Re:In which case you're going to have to explain.. by Quietust · 2012-12-19 02:28 · Score: 1

How on earth do you translate 240p to "240 frames progressive" without making the [effectively] industry-standard terms "480i", "480p", "720p", "1080i", and "1080p" equally meaningless?
It means 240 scanlines progressive - old NTSC television sets normally like to run at 480i, but they're tolerant enough to handle video signals which don't have the extra half-scanline at the end of each frame and display it non-interlaced.

--
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
Re:In which case you're going to have to explain.. by CronoCloud · 2012-12-19 02:30 · Score: 1

240p refers to the vertical resolution. aka 320x240 progressive.
Easiest way to see it in action is to play a PSone game that does 240p (Like PSone Diablo) on a PS2....using component cables connected to an HDTV. Some HDTV's like mine have trouble syncing to a 240p signal over component (I would have to toggle inputs till it syncs) Play the same game over S-Video and it's fine.
From the sad reality department by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 02:40 · Score: 0

Guys, I need to tell you this too: I can pretty much guarantee in the next decade software will still be released with bugs. Thanks, now buy my book!
Re:In which case you're going to have to explain.. by Viol8 · 2012-12-19 02:41 · Score: 1

Fine, I didn't read it properly - but how do you do progressive when the hardware is built for interlaced? We're talking analogue TV sets here - they DON'T DO progressive. Period.
Re:In which case you're going to have to explain.. by Viol8 · 2012-12-19 02:48 · Score: 1

Rubbish. The hardware is built for interlaced - it has no way of knowing that it shouldn't skip a scanline line because its a progressive signal. All you'll see with a progressive signal is the screen flicking between each half of the picture spread across the whole screen with single line blank gaps.
Re:In which case you're going to have to explain.. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 02:49 · Score: 0

240 scan lines, you dolt. Google is your friend.
Delay vsync by half a scanline by tepples · 2012-12-19 02:57 · Score: 3, Informative

but how do you do progressive when the hardware is built for interlaced?

The vertical sync pulse is delayed by half a frame before odd fields according to this diagram. Delay it and the analog hardware will begin retrace a half scanline later, which produces an odd field. Don't delay it and the TV interprets it as an even field.

We're talking analogue TV sets here - they DON'T DO progressive. Period.
Then how does my analog TV set do progressive when my NES, Genesis, Super NES, original PlayStation, or Nintendo 64 is connected to it? Question mark?
1. Re:Delay vsync by half a scanline by Viol8 · 2012-12-19 23:06 · Score: 1
  
  "Then how does my analog TV set do progressive when my NES, Genesis, Super NES, original PlayStation, or Nintendo 64 is connected to it? Question mark?"
  They're connected through the RF input which simply inputs a PAL or NTSC signal. It'll be interlaced.
CORRECTION by tepples · 2012-12-19 02:59 · Score: 2

"The vertical sync pulse is delayed by half a frame before odd fields" should be "half a scanline period".
Spawn installation by tepples · 2012-12-19 03:03 · Score: 0

I was under the impression that most households were not willing to buy multiple up-to-date gaming PCs and multiple copies of each game to create an in-home LAN. Or what game are you thinking about that runs on the outdated graphics cards in hand-me-down PCs and allows use of one license across multiple computers in one LAN, other than the original StarCraft?
What about the rest of the World? by mfraz74 · 2012-12-19 03:10 · Score: 1

Not every country uses 30/60fps like the USA, why not release them in 25/50fps too?
What does he know? by Dunge · 2012-12-19 03:13 · Score: 1

He's always the one moving against the norm with strange idea. He was good in the 90's, but nowadays he's out of the loop. Rage technology sucked pretty hard. Doom3 was very criticized because of the strange FPS caps.
Response times ~0.07sec by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 03:27 · Score: 0

Since you have to see, respond and see the result within the response time for it to be indistinguishable pysiologically from IRL framerates (1/3 of 0.22sec), that would indicate a framerate of 1/.07 should be fine as long as it is a hard lower limit. 15 fps should be enough.
Incorrect, actually. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 03:44 · Score: 0

CDs require a digital amplification.
Digital amplification needs rectification and either symmetric or separate amplification with the two signs of polarity. That changes the evenness of the waveform produced and can degrade performance.
And the nyquist limit is SOLELY to reproduce the FREQUENCY of the tone. Not the loudness and not the phase. So an analogue nominally at 15kHz will reproduce the waveform AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE PLAYED more accurately than a digital signal from a 44kHz unless you're reproducing a few pure sine waves.
Digital amplification also amplifies the odd harmonics whereas analogue amplification and that is a poor match to how our perception wants to hear sound, so it sounds worse to our perception. That can be removed by doubling the frequencies amplified which increases power required fourfold and requires a greater linear range (therefore either more expense or worse linearity) to reproduce. That is why valve amps at 10W sound louder and better (or at least no worse) than a digital amp rated on the same accuracy measure at 70W.
It isn't about vinyls distortions, it's about the digital amplification distortions and the methods to remove or at least overpower those distortions. Vinyl is a naturally reproduced wave. CD is a digitally amplified analogy of the natural wave and it has to work MUCH harder to reproduce the natural waveform.
Re:In which case you're going to have to explain.. by Jmc23 · 2012-12-19 04:38 · Score: 1

Just how old are you? It's like you've never seen a CRT in real life.

--
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Perception trained on valves by tepples · 2012-12-19 04:52 · Score: 1

Digital amplification needs rectification and either symmetric or separate amplification with the two signs of polarity.
How is this true? It's possible to convert digital to analog with an unsigned DAC and rely on an analog high-pass filter later in the circuit to eliminate DC. Do you also have a problem with class-D amplifiers in general?

And the nyquist limit is SOLELY to reproduce the FREQUENCY of the tone. Not the loudness and not the phase.

Loudness is covered under the noise floor measurement, and modern noise shaping techniques push this well under -100 dBFS for the frequencies to which the ear is most sensitive by moving more of the dither noise to the 16-22 kHz band. Phase is the reason that the sampling rate is twice as high as the highest frequency: to simplify a bit, half of the information is frequencies, and the other half is phase.

Digital amplification also amplifies the odd harmonics whereas analogue amplification and that is a poor match to how our perception wants to hear sound
That's a problem with English: the word "our" has no distinction between "your and my" and "his and my". It could be that your perception was just trained on valves.
give me back 16-bit and glorious 60fps by orthicviper · 2012-12-19 07:05 · Score: 1

I miss the old days of 16-bit games where it was always 60 fps. I remember playing Sonic the Hedgehog games with speed and fluidity before Sega gimped him to at times even less than 30 fps. This 30fps target is the biggest reason I prefer PC over consoles :/ . That and my "moral" opposition to fragmenting gamers across several locked and closed down game systems.
1. Re:give me back 16-bit and glorious 60fps by Narishma · 2012-12-19 08:03 · Score: 1
  
  There were about as much 60 fps games during the 16-bit era as there are nowadays. It's always been a trade-off each developer has to make, and most of them choose better looking pixels over a smoother framerate.
  
  --
  Mada mada dane.
Copy per player vs. per household by tepples · 2012-12-19 07:25 · Score: 1

I guess you missed the part that PC gaming will be outselling the entire console industry by the first quarter of next year.
How much of that is revenue from sales of multiple copies to one household? Major-label PC games are more likely to require a separate copy for each player, as opposed to a copy per household like Smash Bros. (4 players non-split), Mario Kart (4 players split), and Xbox 360 versions of Call of Duty series (2 players split) support.
Android launched with no paid apps in many places by tepples · 2012-12-19 07:34 · Score: 1

people [who use Android] have been trained to pay little to nothing for games and value them as such.
I'd bet the root cause of this is the fact that in the early days of Android Market, very few countries had paid applications, so users came to expect apps to be ad-supported.
Startups by tepples · 2012-12-19 07:36 · Score: 1

So for what platform is a startup supposed to develop? Consoles are off limits without experience and financial stability.
Other things a tablet can do by tepples · 2012-12-19 07:38 · Score: 1

Why would I buy a tablet for more than three times the cost of a console to replace a console?
Presumably for all the other things a tablet can do that a console can't. (Or equivalently, because you may already own a tablet.) Or for games that are on the tablet that aren't on the console because the console maker turned the developer down.
Bluetooth controller caveats by tepples · 2012-12-19 07:40 · Score: 1

Android tablets already support HDMI out and input from bluetooth controllers.
Using controllers controllers on PCs and Android tablets has several problems compared to using them on a game console. First, because a controller is not bundled with most Android tablets shipping in the United States, developers can't rely on the presence of a controller. (Archos GamePad and Ouya don't ship for several months.) Second, some Android devices (most notably HTC and Samsung devices) have been seen to be incompatible with some Bluetooth controllers. Third, Google has been known to pull the rug out from under developers of applications related to Bluetooth controllers certain when it changes how Bluetooth works in new versions of Android, such as Android 4.2 that broke the Wii Remote driver. Fourth, even if a controller is present and compatible with a given tablet, as I understand it, Bluetooth controllers are like USB controllers in that every model appears to have its numbered buttons in a different order. How likely is it that a casual gamer will have the patience to sit through a button mapping form every time a different brand of controller is connected?
F-Zero X by darkain · 2012-12-19 08:01 · Score: 1

F-Zero X runs at 60 FPS on the N64... What is everyone else's excuses? http://www.ign.com/articles/1998/10/28/f-zero-x
1. Re:F-Zero X by TheSkepticalOptimist · 2012-12-19 08:35 · Score: 1
  
  Game complexity and FullHD graphics?
  
  --
  I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Re:In which case you're going to have to explain.. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-19 08:21 · Score: 0

There are times in life when you don't know what the fuck you're talking about and need to know when shut the hell up. Viol8, for you, this is one of those times.
Where is your console then? by TheSkepticalOptimist · 2012-12-19 08:34 · Score: 1

John seems to say a lot more then he does these days. At least Gabe put his money where his mouth is and actually developed a game console. Maybe John could come out with a game that most gamers don't actually hate.

--
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Re:In which case you're going to have to explain.. by Viol8 · 2012-12-19 23:08 · Score: 1

Yeah , right. I would say its you who has no idea what interlaced and progressive means.
What console and what SDTV? by tepples · 2012-12-20 03:22 · Score: 1

Wikipedia describes these consoles' nonstandard low-definition signal. If the TV were interpreting the signal from a retro console or 8-bit home computer as interlaced, the image would bounce up and down by half a pixel at 30 Hz. And it does just that when I run the console through a Philips DVD recorder, which always outputs an interlaced signal. But when I plug the console directly into a CRT SDTV through the RF or composite input, the image does not bounce. I therefore must conclude that sending the vsync pulse at the same time each field is enough to trick the vast majority of CRT SDTVs into displaying a nonstandard progressive variant of NTSC or PAL correctly. If you are seeing bouncing, what console are you using, what make and model of SDTV are you using, and when was this TV manufactured?
You really are the most ignorant Apple Hater ever by SuperKendall · 2012-12-20 19:06 · Score: 1

This will never happen with iDevices but Android tablets already support HDMI out and input from bluetooth controllers.
iOS has supported bluetooth controllers for as long as Android, and has many more games that make use of them.
iOS has also supported HDMI out for some time, especially when mirroring the screen via airplay through an AppleTV.
Is it a hobby of yours to be ignorant? Or has one too many Fosters killed off the part of your brain that knows how to use Google?
It's like someone took an Apple Hater from 2005, and froze them in a cave somewhere and only just thawed you out. Let me guess, you also hate that Apple dropped floppy drives and only has one button mice.
I'll let you have the last word as reading any more revelatory comments from you displaying further ignorance would move beyond humor and into pity. I prefer to reserve my pity for people that might potentially help themselves.

--
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley