noname2200 on 29 October 2009
http://www.insomniacgames.com/blogcast/blog/mike_acton/1503082
How much does framerate matter?
Posted Today at 4:00 am
Recently we've been asking ourselves some hard questions:
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What is it that we want to focus on?
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What's most important to us?
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What do we want to make?
And the answer is simple:
We want to give you guys, our fans and players, the best looking games you can buy on a console.
You may have already seen Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time (available in US stores now!)
I'm really proud of what our art and production teams accomplished in this game. It's a great looking game, a ton of fun to play and is 60fps.
And it's that last point that I want to talk about today. One of the long-standing sacred cows here at Insomniac is framerate. We’ve long viewed a solid framerate as both a sign of a quality product and professionalism as developers. It’s always been point of pride in our work and considered an extremely serious part of our development process.
However, during development, there are hard choices to be made between higher quality graphics and framerate. And we want to make the right choices that reflect our commitment to providing you with the best looking games out there. To that end, our community team did some research into the question of framerate. The results perhaps confirmed what I’ve known for a long time, but found it difficult to accept without evidence. They found that:
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A higher framerate does not significantly affect sales of a game.
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A higher framerate does not significantly affect the reviews of a game.
And in particular they found that there was a clear correlation between graphics scores in reviews (where they are provided) and the final scores. And they found no such correlation between framerate and the graphics scores nor the final scores. As an interesting side-note, our team also found no direct correlation between gameplay scores and final scores, however it does appear that gameplay scores are also influenced by graphics scores. i.e. Better looking games appear to be more “fun” to reviewers, in general.
After reviewing our internal research, I decided to take this question to the public. I wanted to see what the players themselves thought of this question. Here are the results of that poll:
The first thing I noted in reviewing these results was that 16% of the respondents said they wouldn’t buy a non 60fps game. Now, considering the top selling games and the market research, I take that to mean one of two things:
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People are big fat liars. Sales numbers clearly contradict this pattern. Or,
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The group responding to this poll in the first place was a self-selected group of people with an interest in framerate in the first place. Which may also explain why that last group is represented by such a small response rate in the poll results.
Based on the research, the informal polling and various conversations with fans and other game buyers, I’ve come to the following conclusions:
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Framerate is important, but not critically so. When there is a clear choice between framerate and improved graphics, graphics should win. The correlation with review scores is clear.
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There is virtually no advantage in sales or reviews of a 60 fps game versus a 30 fps game.
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Only a minority of players notice framerate as a significant issue of any kind.
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Framerate should be as consistent as possible and should never interfere with the game. However, a drop in framerate is interestingly seen by some players as a reward for creating or forcing a complex setup in which a lot of things must happen on the screen at once. As in, “Damn! Did you see that? That was crazy!”
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A solid framerate is still a sign of professional, well-made product. When there is a trade-off for framerate, it needs to be clearly worth it. i.e. It must introduce clear improvements on what the player sees, and never used as an excuse to not optimize the game or art.
What does all of this mean, really?
It means that framerate is still important to us here at Insomniac, but it’s not on the same pedestal it was before. And that Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time will probably be Insomniac’s last 60fps game.
Mike.
This post disappoints me deeply. Not with Insomniac mind you, unless they're lying for some bizarre reason. But the confirmantion that eye candy means more to gamers (and reviewers) than solid performance makes me sad. The underlined in particular makes me want to cry. I hope thier polling data was off...
