Frame Rates

[DJ-Daz]

I've have just finished reading someone's comments about Wipeout HD/Fury after playing the game in 3D.
They loved the effects that 3D gives them, but hated the fact that the game only runs at 30 frames per second, and as a result, then went on to slate 3D in general.

Now that seems a little biggoted and closed minded or at least to me it does.

Now Wipeout HD is a gorgeous game in 720p, but in 1080p it looks amazing, all the jaggies are gone! The detail level seems to have been ramped up, and yet it still keeps ticking over at 60fps.
But introduce 3D and the frame rate drops to 30fps. Now I'm sure with a little more work Liverpool Studio's could have regained the lost frames, but would it have been necessary?

I dont think so, most people can see a difference in 15fps to 30 fps, but beyond that it really is difficult to judge the difference correctly. Not forgetting that most LCD TV's will blur and reduce the visual pleasure due to slow refresh rates.

You might see that the game looks smoother at 60fps, but you'd struggle to determine the correct FPS, where as a cartoon usually runs at around 15fps and you can see the difference.

Plus in the end, it's all subjective, some people will clearly see the difference and know it's running at 60fps, while most will just notice a slightly smoother frame rate.


Would you refuse to buy a 3D TV just because of this?
As far as I am aware, the PS3 has yet to be pushed graphically, so yes right now there may be a dip in FPS, but long term no doubt the devs will catch up and increase FPS.


@InfiniteStates
You must have done some work on framerates in the past, whats your take?

[Astro]

Does the PS3 have some legs left yes, but I reckon the bar is pretty high at the moment I don't think it can go much further without a complete re-do.

Basically the PS4 the PS3 as it stands falls down in it's graphics solution (not the CBE the Nivdia custom card) and RAM (more specifically the amount of RAM and it's bandwidth 512mb shared memory just plain pisses me off) :pissed_off:

Keep the CBE slap a more recent nvidia solution with say 1gb of RAM and bang I'm a happy camper.

[DJ-Daz]

But isn't it too early to be talking about the PS4?
512mb ram might sound pretty poor, but it's used for games only, not other OS stuff.

[theENIGMATRON]

I wudnt say its to early. Every 5 years they pushed a console out ain't they. I would expect to hear something end of this year. Xmas maybe or next year defo

[YorkshirePud]

they best fucking not because im still a PS3 noobie really i was able to afford the PS and the PS2 during their launches...

[InfiniteStates]

The PS3 was supposed to have a 10 year life span. There was an interesting editorial on IGN entitled "Who Cares About Graphics Anymore?" recently about why hardware is slowing down.

@Godric: LOL RAM isn't the answer to everything...

@InfiniteStates
You must have done some work on framerates in the past, whats your take?

An excellent question, my friend. I'm glad you asked

Funnily enough I have recently tackled an analagous problem, but the lessons learned could be applied to 3D rendering as well.

As you probably know, I used to write games on the Nintendo DS. You no doubt know that it has two screens. What you may or may not know is that only one screen can be configured to be the primary screen and therefore capable of rendering 3D output. So how do you do dual screen 3D as a lot of DS games do?

A typical game loop will look like this:

Code: Select all

DoForever
{
  UpdateGame();
  RenderGame();
}

The DS refreshes its screens at 60Hz, but Nintendo's API provides a mechanism for capturing the current output of a screen into memory. So to render dual screen 3D you set one screen as the primary and render your 3D scene to it. During the vblank you then capture that rendered output as a flat image, switch the primary screen, and then render the captured image to the secondary screen while rendering a different 3D scene to the new primary.

So now your game loop looks like:

Code: Select all

DoForever
{
  UpdateGame();

  if(topScreenActive)
  {
    RenderTopScreen();
    DisplayCapturedBottomScreen();
    CaptureTopScreen();
  }
  else
  {
    DisplayCapturedTopScreen();
    RenderBottomScreen();
    CaptureBottomScreen();
  }

  SwapScreens();
}

It's easy to see that your refresh rate on any one screen is now halved (i.e. 60Hz to 30Hz). I would imagine much the same principle applies to 3D except swap top and bottom screen with left and right eye. But this is all back story really...

What I found while working on all this is that as Daz pointed out - the drop from 60 to 30 FPS isn't too detrimental in terms of video update. What is however hugely important and perceptible is if the control update also drops. Then there really is an obvious difference between the 2 speeds.

And as I showed in the example above, you can seperate the game logic/control update from the rendering update, so your game can continue to run at 60Hz, but only updates the display at 30Hz. This way you get the best of both worlds - your game still feels tight, but you can afford to push the rendering further (or render two screens).

[DJ-Daz]

Funny you should mention input lag, no one mentioned that on topic I read, it was all framerate.
One person did say however that the increased depth made the game easier, as they could gauge distances much more acurately.

[redVENGEANCE]

are all the cell processors currently used in high end games, I thought 1 or 2 were locked out, maybe I'm wrong!

[DJ-Daz]

I was quoting something I read last week about Uncharted 2, it pushed the boundries of visuals, but still only used 2 cores.

As for games today, I dont know tbh.

[InfiniteStates]

One is permanently locked out and never available. It's reserved for the XMB. As far as I know, nothing has used remotely the available capacity. But CPU crunching isn't the bottle neck usually, as far as I'm aware.