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Carmack: Next-Gen Console Games Will Still Aim For 30fps
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."
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.
Better known as 318230.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
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??
For me the higher framerate helps suspend disbelief because everything moves more fluidly. 24fps always gave me a headache too.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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".
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.
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
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.
*snore*
Uncanny valley?
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
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.
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.
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...
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'
My subjective reason for hating 48fps: the movie looks like a sitcom.
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.
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.
... how old style arcade games running on 50/60Hz interlaced CRTs managed to produce smooth flicker free motion?
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
LOL, the consoles that are coming out in 2013 are not woefully outclassed by PCs.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"The vertical sync pulse is delayed by half a frame before odd fields" should be "half a scanline period".
Not every country uses 30/60fps like the USA, why not release them in 25/50fps too?
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.
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.
I think I heard it best stated like this: It looks so realistic, you can see how fake it is.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So for what platform is a startup supposed to develop? Consoles are off limits without experience and financial stability.
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....
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.
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 runs at 60 FPS on the N64... What is everyone else's excuses? http://www.ign.com/articles/1998/10/28/f-zero-x
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.
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.
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{$f});";}f});
The pores and freckles don't bother me. I can see those on the big screen, after all. The thing that bugs me about blu-ray is that I can see all the MPEG compression noise, especially in animated films.
Until the compressors get better, I'm not getting a blu-ray player.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
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.
Yeah , right. I would say its you who has no idea what interlaced and progressive means.
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?
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