Battlefield vs. Modern Warfare: Does 60FPS Really Matter?

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.

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.