Why 60fps Is Important: Visceral Games

On Monday we covered Dante’s Inferno in one of our regular Tech Analysis features, and one of the main points I made was how well the game managed to hold a steady 60 frames per-second. In fact the demo never drops any frames at all, and in the final game I’ve been told that it does so only on a three or four occasions. This is certainly a feat most games in the current gen simply do not achieve, and perhaps should look toward, especially when it has such a strong impact with regards to gameplay.



Now I’ve always been a firm advocate of having 60fps as the benchmark that all software developers should aspire to. The fluidity and motion clarity for graphics, and the extra degree of accuracy with regards to control, are all vastly important for creating a solid, perfectly fine-tuned gameplay experience, especially where timing is involved. 60fps isn’t just about how good things look, or how smooth they can go. It also plays a large part in how responsive the controls are and how quick you are able to respond to them. For example a game running at 30fps will give you only half the degree of control and range that you get when running at 60fps. You will loose much of the precision and accuracy gained by using a higher framerate.

However, visuals are also still an important backbone for the next-gen experience, and with 60fps comes not only smoother motion, but also a cleaner judder free image, one which retains more detail when moving at high speed compared to the same image running at 30fps. In effect you get detail visible on screen for longer periods whilst having a smoother more impressive look.

Visceral Games seem to agree, and in an in-depth interview with Gamasutra confirm how important having 60fps really is.

Jonathan Knight in the interview stated how he pushed forward the notion of the game (Dante’s Inferno) needing to run at 60fps to the dev team, making sure everyone was committed to making it happen, whilst still finding ways of displaying the same impressive special effects found in 30fps titles but at 60.

"I think any artist would be lying if they said that they didn't prefer to have more bandwidth," he said. "Any milliseconds you give them, they're going to use it on just one more effect, or what-have-you. But what we found is, it's more of a question of willpower than a technology question. And you just have to commit to it, and say, 'Here are your budgets. Here's the box we're gonna play in.'

He followed up with:

"30 frames is a very challenging box to play in as well, and so once you just get everybody bought into that, then what I've found is that the visual effects artists, and the environment artists, and so forth, they just found ways to make stuff look good at 60, and you just have to hold them to it."

In addition Knight also feels that 60fps can help improve the overall quality of the visual experience:

"If you were to take a screenshot, you might be able to point out, like, 'OK, here's the compromise you made because of your frame-rate,' but when you sit and play the game, the overall visual experience is enhanced by the fast frame-rate. So, I can't really decouple graphics from frame-rate; I don't feel like it's an either/or situation."



His statements seem to reflect those found in other studios that champion the use of higher framerates, such as Infinity Ward, Polyphony Digital, Turn 10 and Sony’s Studio Liverpool. All of which stand by the use of higher framerates not only as a means to push the envelope graphically, but also to enhance the overall gameplay experience.

With Visceral Games on board, it’s good to see at least another developer committing to pushing higher framerates this generation, and with the 3D revolution potentially only a few months away, it will become increasingly more important to do so.

IQGamer will be publishing an in-depth feature on 60fps and why it matters in the near future.

Tech Analysis: Dante's Inferno

Dante’s Inferno may be a blatant God Of War rip off, but it is also one of the best examples of platform parity across PS3 and Xbox 360. It does so not by playing to the strengths of each machine, but by simply having an engine which barely taxes either system, making some concessions to alleviate the issue of PS3 having a lack of available bandwidth, and 360’s need to fit the framebuffer into it’s 10mb worth of EDRAM.

You could almost say that Visceral Games effort is an almost exemplary example on how to get a game running and looking identical on both platforms, or rather almost 100% identical. The only exception we noticed to that being a slight blurring of the image on 360, but more on that later.



Dante’s Inferno runs at a flawless 60fps on both PS3 and 360, with no noticeable sign of screen tearing or framerate drops, which in it self is quite impressive for a multi-platform title. However it does this through using only a limited number of memory and shader intensive effects. So what we have here is mostly flat looking textures, with bump mapping reserved for the characters and only certain parts of the environment.

The game is rendered on both PS3 and 360 in 720p (1280x720) with no anti-aliasing of any kind. This allows the framebuffer to fit into the 10mb EDRAN found on 360’s GPU, whilst making the conversion to PS3 much easier as it doesn’t put a stain on the bandwidth. The resolution of transparencies and particle effects usually lowered on PS3 due to the lack of available bandwidth has been compromised on both versions. So instead of 360 having the usual advantage when it comes to displaying loads of multi-layered effects, it’s merely equal across the board. Again this basically allows the smooth running of the game on both platforms whilst keeping the actual look identical; certainly, it’s how Visceral have achieved the constant 60fps on display.

Anisotropic filtering and texture detail is like for like across both versions, demonstrating clean and clear characters and vistas, though the overall sense of scale is rather small, and the detail itself is somewhat simple when compared to the likes of Bayonetta or Devil May Cry. Serviceable is how I think you could best describe the overall look and technical application.



Now earlier we mentioned that both PS3 and 360 games were almost identical, except for a slight blurring on the 360 version. This blur whilst being hardly visible during fast moving scenes can be clearly seen in the still screenshots above, and during more sedate moments of gameplay. It seems that there is a horizontal 1-pixel wide blur on all edges, with no apparent reason as to why. It could be that the developers still wanted some sort of AA solution, but seeing as 720p 2xAA may not have fit into the EDRAM, they thought a simple blur approach would suffice. It’s perhaps the only blemish on what can be considered one of the best multi-platform conversion examples available on both consoles.

Overall, Visceral Games have shown just how to successfully accomplish a good multi-platform conversion without sacrificing too much from each version along the way. Sure they could have played up to the 360’s strengths and added higher-resolution effects and more particles, or had extra HDR lighting on the PS3 game, but it would have taken longer to develop and required more optimising for both versions. This is a problem most would rather avoid, so it’s easier to go down the safe route, and keep your development budget under control and get good results, rather than having it spiral out with two different versions, each having their own tweaks, and neither achieving parity.

Date’s Inferno shows you don’t need to achieve a massive technical accomplishment when creating a game, but rather just a well thought out approach and a solid underlying engine, which can perform on both systems without needing to radically tailor features to each one.

In this respect Visceral have been successful, and I imagine that more developers will go down the same path seeing as it can work so well.