What would you guys think of a 30fps/60fps toggle on most console games?

[ArchangelMadzz]

torok said:

The biggest problems is that it isn't as easy as it looks. It's not a trivial task to improve framerate because it can be bottlenecked by CPU or any of the several subsets of GPU capabilities. Even on PC, you won't do that: games will flutuate the framerate around the average value, so the best shot of getting it all times would be aim to a 70-75 fps average and V-sync everything while praying that you won't get stuttering anyway.

You could think about the console game development process as a "PC graphics settings screen" that could define different settings for all areas. A good example is Metro Last Light: on my PC the framerate is around 50 to 60 fps in the tunnels and all metro combat areas. Outside, it will oscillate between 25-40 fps, hovering around 30 most of the time. In the end, I could use higher setting on the tunnels, but the outside areas would be unplayable. The PS4 version gets locked 60fps, simply because they tunned each area to get the best visuals they could.

The point is: managing framerate is hard, you have several bottlenecks and stuttering and tearing are possible side effects. To get the best performance of the hardware, it's better to be consistent with your goals. The only game that does it is TLOUR, a port of a PS3 game with last gen lightning, last gen geometry and a last gen engine that simply doesn't look nowhere as good as 8th gen titles.

ArchangelMadzz said:

 

TLOU doesn't change graphical settings to achieve 60fps.

It does. In 30fps it presents better shadows.

This has been pointed out earlier, that was my bad.

It would take more work, but if you designed the games visuals around the idea of it running 30fps, and optimised it for such. having an option that lowes the texture quality and lighting effects, AA, rendering distance etc to get the fps to climb up I'm not sure I see the problem into what would make it such an impossible task? It's not like PC versions where you can have 100's different configs for your visuals.