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A note on 30fps vs 60fps:
It’s not as simple as you think.
When we render at 60fps we have ~16ms per frame to do our rendering.
A large chunk of that frame budget is basic expense: polygon and material costs. Let’s say, for example, in a dense scene we are looking at 10ms frame cost just for the basics.
That leaves us 6ms for things like ambient occlusion, screen space reflections, subsurface scattering, particle effects, bloom, and other post processing effects that make **** super pretty.
That’s not a lot of budget.
But what happens when we drop down to 30fps?
We now have ~33ms per frame for rendering. We have the same base 10ms cost, but now we have 23ms for the pretty ****.
That’s almost FOUR TIMES the budget for advanced rendering features.
Games running at 60fps make significant sacrifices to rendering quality in order to achieve the higher frame rate.
It’s not a magic button we push to suddenly get double the FPS.
If the gameplay works at 30fps, it often makes sense to aim for 30fps with better rendering.
With Uncharted 4, our multiplayer ran at 60fps, but to achieve that we had to turn off almost all of the advanced rendering features, with less particle effects, no (or heavily limited) dynamic light sources, and minimal post processing.
It made sense to run MP at 60fps because the gameplay felt better. But SP plays great at 30fps and looks so much prettier. If we’d shipped with 60fps SP the game’s aesthetics would have suffered a lot.
As a lighting artist a lot of frame budget and optimisation is my responsibility. I have to make sacrifices in almost every scene to get a consistent 30fps. Better hardware just means I am aiming even higher for better rendering, and I don’t see it changing any time soon.
