Need for Speed: Rivals capped @30fps on pc

[Haste]

An AAA racing game from 2013 capped at 30 frames per second! How could this even happen?
How can we make game developers aware that this is way too low to provide a satisfying experience?

Review by "TotalBiscuit, The Cynical Brit" on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDA37BmvNwM

Forum thread about the 30fps cap at EA forum: http://answers.ea.com/t5/Need-for-Speed ... 3#U1858463

Interesting quote from the above link:
"Running at 30 fps provides a smooth experience when driving in this open world powered by AllDrive.
We are listening and targeting 60 FPS in the future."

[trey31]

I saw this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpC43CdvjyA

edit: whoops. double post.

[Haste]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpC43CdvjyA

This is gold! hahaha

[trey31]

At first it appears the FPS is locked to the gamespeed, but after looking at the pre-race animations, my guess is that there is a way to run the speed at 30 like it is on default while still setting the FPS limit higher. I can't test though, I skipped this because, well, its EA...

[trey31]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xcbNSwbpPU

And it appears I was right after some sifting. 1:00 to 1:40 is the part you'll need to really focus on. It'll slow down if fps drops below 60, so you'll have to render it at a minimum of 60 for it to work. Also 120hz will crash it apparently.

[Chief Blur Buster]

Interesting quote from the above link:
"Running at 30 fps provides a smooth experience when driving in this open world powered by AllDrive.
We are listening and targeting 60 FPS in the future."

They need to target 120fps.

[Ahigh]

You maximum framerate in any racing game should be the framerate that you can hit 99.9% of the time. And when you do miss framerate, that is when you want to do something like "Adaptive Sync." Going from 60fps to 30fps and back to 60fps is a horrible experience. G-Sync solves this and so does Adaptive Sync to a lesser extent. But locking at 30Hz for a driving game where you can basically drive anywhere is not a surprising solution to a very difficult problem.

Most good solid 60hz driving games know exactly what to draw as you are going down a track where your camera position and orientation and draw complexity is mapped out in detail by a designer.

If you are allowed to explore, this problem is much more difficult. It doesn't even matter how powerful your graphics system is, it's more about framerate consistency.

This is one of the great things about G-Sync is these problems all become the problems of yesterday and fluid graphics can exist on sample-and-hold displays at just about any framerate. You don't solve eye-tracking problems with variable framerate but you do solve temporal accuracy error problems which is what creates what is commonly known as "judder." Eliminating judder is the reason why this team has elected to limit to 30hz. They can probably make 60hz every once in a while, but it actually looks worse to tear or have the framerate go up and down between 60hz and 30hz.

Games that go 30hz/20hz don't look as messed up as games that go 60hz/30hz because the temporal errors .. even though they are still off by 16.6 ms are less in terms of the fraction "wrongness" of the boundaries of taking 48ms versus 33ms and back being less psychologically jarring than taking 33ms instead of 16.6ms and back to 16.6ms.

[Chief Blur Buster]

You maximum framerate in any racing game should be the framerate that you can hit 99.9% of the time. And when you do miss framerate, that is when you want to do something like "Adaptive Sync." Going from 60fps to 30fps and back to 60fps is a horrible experience. G-Sync solves this and so does Adaptive Sync to a lesser extent. But locking at 30Hz for a driving game where you can basically drive anywhere is not a surprising solution to a very difficult problem.

Good points about frame consistency. I love racing games that can maintain a 120fps consistent frame rate, and thus can benefit from strobe backlights, which enhances the high speed motions found in racing, tracking your eyes on things that zoom by.

Indeed, G-SYNC solves a lot of the consistency issues during framerate variability. However, game makers need to optimize their games to work well at any frame rates without glitching.

When Daytona USA came out almost twenty years ago, using Sega Model 3 graphics engine, I was quite impressed -- bilinear interpolated textured polygons at consistent 60 frames per second with all that 3D graphics going on, jawdropping for its era -- It never framedropped below 60 frames per second on any race. And it had zero motion blur in everything that zoomed by on the sides (the framerate=flickerrate "CRT effect"). I want to see that effect in my car racing games, and modern strobe backlights are typically 120Hz. So racing game makers should at least make it *possible* to run at 120fps, so people who own Titan's and high end GPU setups, can tweak the racing game to run at these frame rates. A good factor is important, though I'd settle for a 90-95% factor at full framerate, rather than a 99% factor.

Though newer strobe backlights, such as BENQ XL2720Z Blur Reduction, will run as low as 75Hz, so the zero motion blur effect should be available at just 75fps (framerate=flickerate CRT effect).

[trey31]

Agreed. Targeting 60 is all wrong. Aiming for a minimum of 60, with a goal of 120+ should be the bare minimum devs target. This way, on cross-platform games, they could possibly advertise 60 as a feature on a console (if they could get it to that...), and then do the same with 120 on PC. Not just a graphics thing either, decreased input lag could easily be dressed up as an all-new console feature called "advanced wheel control response" or similar for a racing game.

Furthermore, instead of Xbox One rendering some games at 720p or 900p, then "upscaling" them to 1080p/30, why not develop certain games to render at 1080i/60 instead? Heck even putting an option in the menu for a console game allowing users to choose "Scaled Progressive/30hz" or "Interleaved/60hz" couldn't be all that hard. I mean, which would you choose if given a choice on a console racing game? 720p@30hz locked, or 1080i@60hz locked?

[Ahigh]

Well, I am very hopeful after seeing this Sony motionflow even at 60hz that we can have a revival in solid consistent framerate arcade style games. When I initially told my recruiter I wanted to work on arcade racing games, I thought I might have to move to Japan and work with Sega in order to do that. The chance to make a solid 60hz arcade driving game experience at Atari was a unique and fleeting moment for developing arcade games domestically here in the states.

Japanese culture, including Sega and NHK in general are very knowledgeable about displays and the benefits of solid 60hz for motion portrayal in the days of tubes. And while the 80's saw plenty of 60hz 2d arcade games, the 3d arcade games that made it into production here in America didn't always make a solid 60hz.

My point about framerates, though, is that a racing game that stays on rails can target framerate more easily than a roam-anywhere style of game like GTA. It's apples and oranges. No matter what the framerate ends up being, when you are roaming the world and especially if you are going to have fires, explosions, and lots of stuff going on _sometimes_ and other times not much going on, you're talking about variable framerate by game design.

I wish the world were as simple as some people see it when it comes to dealing with these issues as a designer.

I put so much work into making Rush 2049 coin-op be able to run at a solid 60hz in solo mode with no drones (phantom mode). And when you play it in linked mode, it locks to 30hz too. So there ya go!