Phil Spencer - "Why do you care about 60fps?"

[Jizz_Beard_thePirate]

Imaginedvl said:

Medisti said:
60fps isn't just about smoothness of the picture. It means twice as many frames to recognize inputs every second, which makes the games more responsive (depending on your reaction times). There's a reason why fighting games made 60fps a standard.

As a game developper, let me tell you that what you just said is wrong (bold part) :)
You are mixing 2 things here, the rendering of your game and the game loop (where inputs can be captured or things can be moved in the game world, AI stuf etc)...

The game loop can (and usually runs) way faster than 60 fps and not every frame is going to be rendered; and even for a 30fps games...

So while you want to have a smooth framerate in any case for fighting games for instance, it will not affect the responsivness (for the input part). Now I give you that having a better framerate helps with the visual and it feels just way better at the end. You can actually even see that with other things in video games, one very good exemple are the objects that are out of screen or far away. You can sometime see some objects behind "refreshed" by the game loop only 10 times per seconds (Dragon Age Inquisition does that a lot and it is actually really weird some time)...

Regarding the OP: I think at the end I would prefer a lower res with higher fps. So I care about FPS yes :)

Except... It will due to frames being rendered twice as fast...

Assuming the developer isn't an idiot and has everything else in shape, the bottleneck then becomes the framerate. A faster framerate means that your actions are translated onto the screen just that much quicker. In 30fps, the amount of time your display will be sitting at a frame is 33 ms apart where as in 60fps, it is 16 ms apart. So when someone is moving their mouse for example, it will take at least 33 ms before they can see cursor move on the screen in 30fps where as in 60fps, it will take 16ms. So yes it does improve your input lag assuming everything else is up to snuff.

It is why framerate is so important in fighting games and other high responsive games and it's just better to have high framerate in general...