Topic: Resolution or Frame Rate?

With the Witcher 3 reviews saying that the frame rate can at times struggle to maintain a 30fps on their pre-release build version (CD Projekt have said they are working on these performance issues), I want to know if the 1080p resolution is more important - especially in a game as beautiful as this or is a consistent frame rate most important? Is there a point at which an occasional frame rate drop is an acceptable sacrifice for 1080p visuals? For example, it only happens very occasionally but most of the time its stable at 30fps. Is a frame rate drop totally unacceptable and therefore you would prefer a lower resolution (like 900p - upscaled if possible) if it means that the frame rate remains consistent regardless.

Personally I prefer consistent frame rates. I would rather have a lower resolution - even in a game like the Witcher 3 if that means the frame rate doesn't drop. As an XB1 owner as well as a PS4, I struggle to see 'significant' differences between 1080p and say 900p upscaled on a 55" 4k TV at the distance I sit. I know the 1080p has a slightly sharper look (which can look a little 'too' sharp) but certainly not as noticeable as a frame rate drop. Therefore I would rather developers delivered the best resolution possible with a locked and consistent frame rate through out.

Hypothetically speaking, How would you feel about Sony if they stipulated to developers that they will only allow games that are at 1080p on their system even if that means inconsistent frame rates? Like I said this is a hypothetical question only. What if MS stipulated that consistent frame rates but must be at least locked at 30fps were the only requirements? For example: Sony tells CD Projekt the game HAS to be 1080p regardless even if frame rate drops frequently and MS tells them it HAS to be locked at 30fps even if the resolution has to be 720p to achieve that. Again hypothetically, would you be happy with this? Would you consider getting an XB1 or even trading in your PS4 to play games with a consistent frame rate?

I am not trying to start a war or even saying that Sony or MS have made these stipulations but trying to ascertain how strongly people feel about Resolution and Frame Rate.

Frame rate all day every day, especially if it's an action game. It may sound harsh in some circumstances, but if we can't hit a solid 30 frames per second on the PlayStation 4, then something's wrong.

I can play a game in 900p without being bothered. I can not stand playing a game that has constant, noticeable frame rate drops. So if from now on all games need to be 900p, 30 fps on PS4 so be it. I find it pathetic that in 2015 this is even a discussion but it's clear these consoles can't hit 1080p, 60 fps. Sucks but it is what it is.

I agree to your view on framerate vs resolution, but honestly most of the games I prefer playing seem to hit home quite fine!

Framerate, but they can't sell frame rate in screenshots, so I see why they go for graphical fidelity.

1080p, 30fps is fine for me, like Destiny, DriveClub, GTA 5, Far Cry 4 etc. There are many games on the PS4 that run great at those settings.

Although, let us not forget, MGS5. Clearly a few compromises have been made to the environments but I'll take that and a silky smooth framerate any day.

I quite agree too - as I said I would rather play a game at 720p if it prevents frame rate drops.

When we look at the specs of a PS4 and XB1 though, I really don't understand why these consoles cannot manage the 1080p/60fps - I have an idea why and will say at the end.

Starting off with the CPU's. Both consoles have a very similar 8 core AMD processor. The PS4 CPU is clocked at 1.6GHz compared to XB1's 1.75GHz. Looking at the minimum specs of BF4, the minimum requirement is an intel dual core 2.4GHz or AMD Athlon X2 2.8GHz

Its no secret that the PS4 has the better GPU. Its 800MHz GPU is roughly equivalent to a Radeon HD 7870 and the 853MHz is equivalent to a Radeon HD 7790 but also has ESRAM to improve performance further - both of which are higher than the minimum requirement for BF4 (Radeon 3870)

RAM is a lot quicker on a PS4 as Sony opted for GDDR5. XB1 has the same 8GB but opted for DDR3. However the minimum required on PC is 4GB and even DDR3 is more than adequate here.

As you can see from this breakdown that in theory, the Hardware is more than enough to meet the minimum standards so why are they 'struggling'? My theory is because of the CPU and the way programming interfaces like OpenGL and DirectX 11 utilise the cores in the CPU. Multi-core processors are brilliant for multi-tasking as 1 core runs the OS, 1 core for running apps, 1 core for graphics but because only 1 core does all the graphic processing and as both CPU's are slower than the minimum needed by more than a third, that's a significant amount of processes that cannot be completed by comparison. If you look at the % of work done by the cores whilst playing a game - Core 1 is doing 90+% of the processes whilst the other(s) are hardly doing anything. Does that mean that this generation is useless and only going to get worse? Maybe but there is also the potential that things can get significantly better too. Both OpenGL and DirectX 11 were designed with single core processors in mind and games programmed with these utilise 1 core predominantly for doing all the graphics - lighting, textures etc. However with the new versions of Open GL and DirectX 12 due in the very near future, this could change. They are designed to share the processing between cores and work together. In something like the minimum required by BF4 for example to cores running at 1.6GHz is able to process more than 1 core running at 2.8GHz both the XB1 and PS4 have 8 cores in their processors.

Any day framerate, it should always be locked solid at 30fps or 60fps not this nonsense where it is going up and down spiking constantly.

I very much this page to "show" what's 30 FPS, 60 FPS, etc. is like:
http://www.testufo.com/#test=framerates&count=3&backg...

You can change the nb. of UFO and the speed at which they move. It helps understand just how important FPS is important even though one may not "see" or "feel" it when there's a full scene drawn on the screen and the eye is busy elsewhere.

To get a bit on the mathematic side, if an object has to move 400 pixels to the right in one second:

• At 60 FPS you will get 60 frames where the object move 6.7 pixels to the right for a total of 400 pixel within a second.
• At 30 FPS you will get 30 frames where the object move 13.3 pixels to the right for a total of 400 pixel within a second.
• If the FPS drops to 20 FPS, you will get 20 frames where the object move 20 pixels to the right for a total of 400 pixel within a second.

If you think 30 FPS is not so bad, moving 13.3 every frame, look at this scale and find what 13 pixels is like : http://mwolk.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/pixel-scale.jpg It's actually quite noticeable if an object moves that much every frame. (And IMO, even 5 pixels is noticeable, even though in a action scene you might not notice it)

Based on what you see above, it's seems obvious that 30FPS should be the absolute minimum. It's also better to aim at higher FPS, especially if there's any kind of movement.

So that's the argument for FPS

@BAMozzy: I'd like to answer your question about why CPU 1 is doing 90% of the work, but honestly we could talk about it for at least one day. There's a lot and lot of hardware background to cover before we can assert whether it's good or not to have one or more CPU do the work.

In an attempt to tell a very long story short, let's just say that multiple core is not the holy grail. It's great for certain tasks, but it also has some serious drawbacks and some of them are related to memory access (e.g.: one core cannot change a memory slot if another core is going to). So in other words, it's not just a game of using all the cores. To get maximum throughput, you may need to figure how to use those cores in order to leverage the advantages of multi-cores while avoiding the disadvantages. A careless implementation could very well result in worse performance*.

• Think of writing a letter: doing it alone is quite simple. Adding more more 2, 4 or 8 people, each taking a turn at writing a sentence will not give better performance (you have to get up and switch place, or pass the letter along, the next candidate has to check where we are at in the writing, etc).

@myth0s Of course its not quite as simple as splitting the workload evenly between more cores as opposed to having just one of these but the new OpenGL/DirectX 12 software will make it easier to have more of the cores doing some of the work and how they work together.

In DirectX 12, large performance gains are achieved through allowing the graphics queue to be spread across multiple threads to compute simultaneously and reduce the time in which hardware is left idle from having to wait for other parts of the graphics queue to finish before starting the next job. If a resolution bump is to be delivered, it's more likely that it will be due to DirectX 12's ability to efficiently break-down the "command buffer" into smaller tasks and spread them across multiple cores to process faster and relay to the GPU much quicker. Much like going from a two-lane country road to an eight-lane superhighway, the shift to DirectX 12 allows more traffic from a processor to reach the graphics card in a shorter amount of time. The end result: more performance, better image quality, reduced latency, or a blend of all three (as the developer chooses).

The whole point though is to reduce that bottlenecking and although I have mentioned more about DirectX 12 in this, both Mantle and Vulkan look to do the same thing. There are increasing numbers of tech demos from various software development houses that are showing how these can change gaming. I doubt we will see a dramatic improvement in existing games - maybe some stabilising. However its already allowing developers to add more enemies, lighting effects, textures and details to their upcoming games - things that wouldn't be possible with DirectX 11 and equivalent because of the bottleneck.

Have you watched any of the tech demo's? This video has a good visual representation of the difference between DX11 and DX12

@BAMozzy Ah! Great to see that you understand most of what's going on under the hood. I did implement a small 3D engine during a computer class. Seriously complex stuff going on there, and we during the class we only covered the basis.

Indeed, every new version of DirectX and it's competitors will bring improvement in this regard. Now, parallelism is just another way for these providers to improve the performance of their engine. Doing so require a lot of R&D, mathematic and computer architecture knowledge. Must be fascinating to work there!

Anyhow, we're getting a bit far from OP's topic

@myth0s Whilst it may be a little off topic - it is still related as it may show why some games are struggling with either resolution or frame rate and show that things can and should improve. Looking at the way the generation 8 consoles are struggling to deliver the expected performance increases over the generation 7 considering they are 10+ times more powerful, its easy to criticise the manufacturers. Its not surprising people are disappointed and questioning why they went with the architecture they did. As the expected replacements to the API's have been in development for a while and no doubt known by Sony and MS, I am sure it influenced their decision. I am sure both Sony and MS could have used a different processor with a higher clock speed and a lot less cores - I believe the XB360 had 3 cores and 3.2GHz compared to 8 cores and 1.75GHz of the XB1. Although that would have benefited them immediately, by the time the new API's are released (expected during 2015), this potentially could actually hold them back. The new API's are designed to make everything more efficient. Its like having a workforce of 8 people all working together on a project compared to employing 4 but 1 does the majority at full speed, and the other 3 sit around watching. Its little wonder why the games aren't delivering at the moment if the hardware is not working efficiently and whilst that is disappointing, knowing what the next generation of API's are hoping to achieve, you can understand both MS and Sony's decision on their choice of architecture - well maybe at least.

Hopefully our hardware/API discussion will alleviate some of that disappointment and maybe help people understand why there is these performances issues - even if the new API's make this topic redundant.

Another question though - assuming that the new API's are not going to be available or can be used to improve existing games, Would gamers be happy if games that are 1080p and marketed as such but have inconsistent frame rates - even occasional, were reduced to 900p to fix those frame rate issues?

Street fighter - frame rate
Final Fantasy - resolution
Mario - frame rate
Walking dead - resolution
Mario kart - frame rate
Football manager - resolution

We will see 1080p 60fps we just need some half decent programmers to actually get to grips with the technology. If Mario brothers ran at 50fps in 1985 then I'm sure we can achieve 60fps 1080p today. I know the talk of bottlenecks, power exchanges and Ram usage is out in the open but its more a case of unoptimised code and last gen engines. The games are too bloated and there are too many instructions going on at once procedurally and bloated rather than condensed.