Battlefield vs. Modern Warfare: Does 60FPS Really Matter?
How frame-rate defines the gameplay experience
This year's video games battle royale - Battlefield 3 vs. Modern Warfare 3 - is underpinned by an age-old technological conflict: 30FPS vs. 60FPS. The question is, how important is the higher frame-rate and to what degree do gamers really care?
On the one side we have the Call of Duty game, co-developed by series founder Infinity Ward and newcomer Sledgehammer Games, utilising what looks to be an enhanced version of the existing, established and hugely successful COD engine, running at 60 frames per second. On the other we have a brand new Battlefield title developed on a fresh 2.0 version of DICE's state-of-the-art Frostbite technology. For the console versions of the game, DICE has targeted what has become the default refresh: 30FPS.
The basics are very straightforward: with Battlefield 3 running at half the frame-rate, DICE has twice the amount of processing time to run game logic and render the action on-screen: 33.33ms vs. the 16.67ms available to the Call of Duty developers, resulting in richer visuals and more complex, realistic physics amongst a whole range of other benefits.
The issue of which frame-rate to target has long been debated and despite the dominance of games like Call of Duty, Gran Turismo and FIFA - all 60FPS titles - the general trend is to support 30FPS instead.
For its part, Modern Warfare 3 will run much smoother and controller latency will be that significantly lower, giving the sensation of precision response from the pad. Some superb art direction and technological tweaks by the developers keeps the game looking competitive, even if the core rendering tech and physics are necessarily not as sophisticated.
Good game design plays its part too, of course. Call of Duty games are typically fairly linear, a rollercoaster ride of sorts, and by guiding the player through a set-route of set-pieces and tightly defined gameplay scenarios, the developers can keep to their target frame-rate and still produce a very good-looking game.
Certainly, the developers believe that 60FPS is a core element of what makes COD the most popular franchise of this generation, with Sledgehammer's Glen Schofield saying that it gives the game its competitive edge over the Frostbite 2.0-powered BF3.
"You can go out and name your engine and call it whatever you want, right. You know, I've done that before; I've seen that trick and the bottom line is, this game will run at 60 frames a second. Not sure any of our competitors will," Schofield told Ausgamers during E3.
"Not sure I've seen any of our competitors on the console especially running at 60 frames a second and I'd be a little scared at this point - in June - if I was looking forward to a particular game that wasn't on the console and running at 60. And I think 60 is our competitive edge and you just don't throw that away."
Thanks to an HD off-air transmission, we were able to re-constitute the 60Hz output of the Xbox 360 in Microsoft's E3 conference. Our performance analysis shows that Modern Warfare 3 maintains its 60FPS output admirably. Indeed, this snippet suggests extensive optimisation to the tech since we last saw it in Black Ops...
Call of Duty: Black Ops developer Treyarch goes into a little more depth on why frame-rate defines the gameplay experience.
"The reason why Call of Duty in my opinion feels so good in your hand, and why it is one of the best expressions of 'that is me on the screen' is because we do let it run at 60 frames per second. That's why it's so fluid," studio boss Mark Lamia told Videogames Daily.
"It's a critical component. Are there parts where it will dip? If there are, only barely for a second if you're lucky. Almost always you're seeing that constant 60 frames a second you've seen in all the Call of Duties. And I think also visually, there's a difference. I think that's why the engine looks a bit different from other engines, because we're running at 60 not 30. That would be a compromise that some people are willing to make - we're not. It’s all about the gameplay, and it's a lot of work to keep it that way."
While we have to take issue with Lamia's claims on performance, the general sentiment is shared by John Carmack of id software, who equates 60FPS with a "quality feel" and fought hard to get that target frame-rate adopted for his team's latest blockbuster, Rage.
"My biggest pride and joy about Rage is that I won the fight for 60 frames per second on there, but it involves significant trade-offs. You can't have 30 guys crawling all over you at 60 frames per second at this graphics technology level because it's painful. It's a lot of effort to do that," Carmack says in a GameSpot interview.
"But, we did make the call that for Doom 4, the single-player is going to go 30 frames per second on the consoles. So we can have 30 demons crawling all over you on there. But the multiplayer is still going to be 60 frames per second, so it has the quality feel that Rage has."
The issue of which frame-rate to target has long been debated and despite the dominance of games like Call of Duty, Gran Turismo and FIFA - all 60FPS titles - the general trend is to support 30FPS instead.
In the case of Battlefield 3, DICE presumably accepts that controller response will suffer but points to advanced visual effects, larger maps, the unparalleled destruction model, and the implementation of vehicles as just a few of the advantages its game has over its major rivals, not to mention a phenomenal deferred shading set-up that produces some sublime lighting. DICE rendering architect Johan Andersson has also pointed out via his Twitter account that Call of Duty games run at sub-HD resolutions - 1024x600 to be precise (Black Ops was actually 960x540 on PS3) - a significant deficit in comparison with Modern Warfare 3's planned native 720p image.
John Carmack has also confirmed that Rage employs a dynamic resolution system on console - when the game drops down from 60FPS, resolution is lowered until the engine recovers performance. It's an intriguing solution similar to work done by Sony's Studio Liverpool. In its WipEout HD, the 1080p60 mode adjusts resolution according to load in a similar manner in order to maintain as high a frame-rate as possible. Evolution Studios uses similar techniques to get MotorStorm Apocalypse running smoothly in 3D.
At the end of the day, there is a finite level of resources available on the current generation consoles. As Carmack says, hitting 60FPS does indeed involve significant trade-offs. However, at the core, creating games is a business. The question is, do gamers actually care? Can these trade-offs impact sales? Would gamers still flock to Call of Duty if it ran at 30 frames per second? Insomniac's engine director, Mike Acton, produced an in-depth study to in an effort to address this question.
Previously a 60FPS advocate, Acton re-thought his position when his community team's research suggested that higher frame-rates do not produce better review scores, and don't boost sales of games. On the flipside, Mike asserts that better graphics definitely do, and the more rendering time available, the more rich and complex the visuals can be. For him, the message was clear: drop frame-rate down from the target 60FPS, improve graphical quality and reap the rewards of higher review scores and sales.
Bearing out his thinking is the way that video games are marketed. The usual tools of the trade are screenshots and video, both of which are better tailored to showing 30FPS console games at their best. Clearly, screenshots will benefit from "better graphics" (note how COD tends to use PC visuals for its screens) but perhaps more importantly, streaming video technology inherently does a better job in showcasing 30FPS games.
Should developers put so much effort into creating 60FPS games when there is no effective marketing vehicle for communicating the difference in smoothness and control response?
By far the most widely disseminated medium for video is the internet. Whether it's YouTube or any other form of streaming video, the plain and simple fact is that Adobe's Flash player has real trouble producing a consistent frame-rate at the best of times and it's utterly hopeless at running 60FPS video. Take a look at the Gran Turismo PSP video we produced further down on this page. Here we tried to showcase the game's buttery-smooth 60Hz refresh. The video is encoded at 60FPS, with a very light encoding profile, and the actual window of motion is PSP native res: a mere 480x272. However, on most PCs or Macs, it doesn't look much smoother than the average 30FPS Flash video, owing to the renderer dropping so many frames.
60FPS titles look more fluid, more pleasing to the eye, but when your main channels for the distribution of video don't show this key plus point, your most important media assets make your game look considerably less impressive than it actually is. All told, it's a bit of a marketing nightmare.
On top of that, while the Xbox 360 has no issues decoding 60FPS video, we've yet to see an Xbox Live Marketplace video running at this frame-rate. On the plus side, however, some of the latest PSN trailers we've downloaded from Sony's service have definitely been encoded at 60FPS (just about all the EU Vita trailers, for starters), and look so much better as a result. Finally we are seeing these games in the way that they will look when you're playing them, but we would imagine that PSN video download stats pale into insignificance compared to the streaming video views elsewhere.
We hand-encoded this Gran Turismo PSP video to run with 60FPS playback in order to show off how smooth the game actually is. However, on most of the computers, frames are dropped due to inefficiencies in Adobe's Flash player. It's a major challenge to market 60FPS gameplay when you can't actually show it properly via streaming video.
There is much to ponder on in Mike Acton's research (for example, can reviewers and consumers properly articulate frame-rate - is a smoother game perceived as "better graphics") but there's little doubt that in the case of the Ratchet and Clank games he helped develop, a sustained 30FPS update in combination with improved visuals would almost certainly result in a stronger product. As it is, we have an excellent parallel example: Travellers' Tales certainly appears to have arrived at the same conclusion as Insomniac and has adopted a similar approach - the vast majority of the LEGO games it has created could hit 60FPS but starting from the recent LEGO Clone Wars release, frame-rate has been halved, with visual complexity and effects work improving dramatically.
However, it's equally fair to say that pin-sharp response from the controls isn't exactly a stock in trade of either Ratchet and Clank or the LEGO games. The compromise pays off because you feel like you're getting a significant visual upgrade, but the gameplay doesn't really suffer as a consequence. It's safe to say that the best-selling 60FPS games out there - COD, GT, Forza, FIFA - just wouldn't play as well as they currently do. The question is whether what they lose could be off-set by what they gain.
There's no doubt that if DICE wanted to produce a 60FPS console shooting game, it definitely could. However, the studio's strategy appears to be somewhat more ambitious than producing a "me too" release: it is deploying a range of new technologies that should take the genre in new directions, while at the same time the underpinnings are there for a new engine technology that not only services the current consoles but also forms the basis for prospective DirectX 11 powered next gen machines, while being flexible enough for non-DICE teams to use (witness Need for Speed: The Run).
Will the upcoming BF3 vs. MW3 conflict resolve the "does 60FPS matter" question? The smart money is on both of these games being so successful that it will only prolong the debate rather than resolve the issue in one way or another. However, at least gamers will have the choice between what will definitely be two very different experiences, and that can only be a good thing.
Interesting article again, thought the conclusion was very apt
Posted:A year ago