Framerate adjust on consoles? Yay or nay?

[eastyy]

i remember there was a thing in bioshock for the xbox 360 where you could choose the v-sync option would change the frame rate

[sj33]

Yeah, that should really become more common. Enabling Vsync would remove tearing, but result in the game being capped at 30fps. If you disabled it, the framerate would be noticably higher, but you ran the risk of screen tearing.

[EvilBoris]

But, for me, it had a pretty negative psychological effect. No matter what way I played the game, it felt compromised. It damaged the game in that it made me aware of its shortcomings and it damaged the system in that it drew attention to the fact that it couldn't run the game as it should using its one unique selling point. In both modes, I felt like I was missing out and, unlike with a PC, there is no option to upgrade hardware so it's not like I can shrug it off thinking my system is just too old.

This is almost exactly how I feel, I often spend longer trying to find the right compromise for the graphical fidelity and framerate and I can never find it. Whereas when I play a console game I can just assume somebody has made those decisions for me, on occasion I may go "eeergh slowdown" but I just shrug it off and carry on, it's out of my control.

If I was making a game, I would want players to experience the game in the way I intended it to be experienced within limits then I would ensure that as creator I could optimise that game to play the way I want it to be played/look/feel.

I certainly wouldn't want an option that turned off all the textures and made everything blank, for the sake of framerate. Or perhaps I felt that the incredible lighting was essential for the correct atmosphere, I wouldn't want players to experience it with the lighting turned off because they wanted a higher resolution.



Developers are getting better with dynamic adjustments, Alan Wake for example disables/enables V-sync automatically depending on the framerate, so that tearing is minimised where possible and framerate is increased where possible.

RAGE on the consoles dynamically changes the resolution on the fly, so if you go somewhere and engine load is increasing, it will drop the resolution to keep the framerate at 60FPS. Very clever stuff. Sooner or later PC games will start to take advantage of this, as developers start seperating the native output res from the framebuffer resolution as they already do on consoles.
You wait for the outrage when the PC community has set their screen resolution to 1920x1080p and the game is actually internally running aspects of the game lower than that, there will be hell to pay. It was bad enough when people worked out it was happening on consoles


The latest post proccessing Anti-Aliasing techniques can also adjust quality automatically on the fly, providing super high quality AA when it's doable and drop it down a few pegs if things are getting a bit hairy.

Tesselation allows polygonal models to scale up and down in detail as required, so instead of needing several different models showing different levels of detail and them "popping" in and out depending on distance they will be able to have super detailed models that are detailed close up, but morph into simpler ones when required.
This solves problems for PC developers too, as a developer of a PC game, do you just make every model insanely detailed, then when it doesn't run on lower spec systems, it's the users fault because they need better hardwaren or do you created lower detail models and face the critiscism that it doesn't take advantage of enthusiast hardware? Tesselation will allow one model to cover a broader spectrum.

It wouldn't suprise me if it's already been done, but I bet it will happen at some point in the future, games where the developer physically changes the resolution on levels that are more demanding or increasing the image quality/resolution in cutscenes.

There will reach a point where the systems that are controlling the image quality are going to be able to do a better job at managing the game on a frame to frame basis that the sheer number of settings made available will just be overwhelming for anybody bar the king of the geeks.

[charlesr]

Good post.

[averybluemonkey]

Tesselation allows polygonal models to scale up and down in detail as required, so instead of needing several different models showing different levels of detail and them "popping" in and out depending on distance they will be able to have super detailed models that are detailed close up, but morph into simpler ones when required.
This solves problems for PC developers too, as a developer of a PC game, do you just make every model insanely detailed, then when it doesn't run on lower spec systems, it's the users fault because they need better hardwaren or do you created lower detail models and face the critiscism that it doesn't take advantage of enthusiast hardware? Tesselation will allow one model to cover a broader spectrum.

It wouldn't suprise me if it's already been done, but I bet it will happen at some point in the future, games where the developer physically changes the resolution on levels that are more demanding or increasing the image quality/resolution in cutscenes.

This is an extremely computationally expensive operation and I don't particularly see this technique as becoming a reality. As of 2006 I don't even think an ideal algorithm that gave reliably human-satisfiable results existed in academia and they are usually decades ahead of industry. What algorithms there were required many, many passes over the character model. Doing things on the fly typically works well and gives you gains when dealing with basic, raw throughput operations but this is talking about complex, realtime floating point intensive calculations that will likely not be hardware accelerated. Some things are just best done off line and trying to be too clever at execution time can eat more cycles than you save. It also make memory footprint difficult to calculate and you're going to see tons of inefficient paging from this.

[eastyy]

to be honest i always wondered ...with pc games if you lowered the resolution would get a better frame rate but if i ran say bayonetta on xbox 360 at 720p and then 1080p its the same

[EvilBoris]

That's because whichever one you pick you the game is still 'making' a 720p image, setting your console to 1080p literally has the Console Zoom that 720p image into a 1080p one.

Like getting a tiny picture and zooming in will become pixellated.

[EvilBoris]

This is an extremely computationally expensive operation and I don't particularly see this technique as becoming a reality. As of 2006 I don't even think an ideal algorithm that gave reliably human-satisfiable results existed in academia and they are usually decades ahead of industry. What algorithms there were required many, many passes over the character model. Doing things on the fly typically works well and gives you gains when dealing with basic, raw throughput operations but this is talking about complex, realtime floating point intensive calculations that will likely not be hardware accelerated. Some things are just best done off line and trying to be too clever at execution time can eat more cycles than you save. It also make memory footprint difficult to calculate and you're going to see tons of inefficient paging from this.

I believe It's already part of Unreal Engine 4 and later versions of 3 and key part of DX11

[averybluemonkey]

Hmm didn't realise they could do this stuff in hardware now. http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/TessellationDX11.html

However as noted in that document it still suffers from the problems of yesteryear because it just does a linear interpolation, so if you aren't careful with your meshes you can get horrendous artefacts (separate from the seams that document talks about). To use it effectively requires a human artist to carefully alter the different density meshes to ensure the algorithm doesn't cause jarring disparities as details get cutout, it creates an improved look but at an increased development cost. Bear in mind also that this uses up cycles that could be used for rendering. So it's a trade off between efficiency and detail, not a silver bullet.

[sj33]

to be honest i always wondered ...with pc games if you lowered the resolution would get a better frame rate but if i ran say bayonetta on xbox 360 at 720p and then 1080p its the same

That's because it's just upscaling, not actually rendering the game at a higher resolution. Think of it as like increasing the size of a picture in Photoshop.

[Mr-Niceguy2001]

That's because it's just upscaling, not actually rendering the game at a higher resolution. Think of it as like increasing the size of a picture in Photoshop.

Would you recommend that pretty much all 360 games be outputted at 720p then and let the tv scale to 1080p? I've always set my 360 to 1080p. Probably be too used to it now on twitch games like COD. Just wondering what the recommended settings would be as I can't think if any native 1080p 360 games.

Good thread by the way