30fps vs 60fps, GPU vs CPU (Gaming)

by dogcow , Hiding from Bob, in the vent core., Thursday, May 25, 2017, 17:12 (2520 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

I look at T2 at 60fps on XB1 and then D2 at 30fps. Shakes head sadly at Bungie. Scorpio has literally been fucked out of 60fps for D2.

Digital Foundry has a pretty good article about this. I was with you that I thought Scorpio should be able to handle it, but Digital Foundry is pretty confident that without Bungie completely rewriting their engine Scorpio wouldn't have the CPU power to hit 60fps with Destiny 2.

The debate between hitting 30 fps vs 60 fps is a contentious one, from the developers' side. Hitting 60fps, and keeping it there, is extremely hard. Your game needs to render more than twice as efficiently as a game running at 30fps (because you're not simply doubling the frames... you still need to account for certain other processes between frames that can't be sped up, so the parts that can be sped up need to go more than twice as fast to make up lost ground). And when it comes to the player experience, user research shows that the vast majority of gamers cannot tell the difference between 30 and 60fps.

So to hit 60fps, you need to make loads of sacrifices in other areas (less texture data, fewer lighting and particle effects, physics, etc etc etc), and then barely anyone will notice the difference anyway.

So for a developer to internally justify all those sacrifices, they need to feel that hitting 60fps will have a significant impact on their specific audience's experience with the game. Fighting games live or die by their reception from the hardcore fighting game community, and those players will absolutely feel the difference between 30 and 60fps. While Titanfall 2 does feature a campaign this time around, it was developed first and foremost as a competitive multiplayer game. And the hardcore shooter crown will also notice the difference.

But Destiny is a larger animal than that. The most hardcore crucible players will certainly complain about the game running at 30 fps... but that's just one of many reasons why I'd argue Destiny isn't the game for hardcore PvP players at all. Its for a broader audience, many of whom are perfectly happy with a rock-solid 30fps.

What I gleaned from the various Bungie videos was that the GPU (on the PS4Pro) had the power to render the graphics at 60fps, but the CPU didn't have the power to run the game loop (ai, physics, networking, etc.) at 60fps.

So, I don't know that you'd have to make sacrifices in textures & lighting (possibly particle effects too, can the physics for those be run on the gpu now? I don't even know anymore). BUT, you would certainly have to make sacrifices in the physics, AI, # of enemies/objects, etc.

It makes me wonder if Bungie could run the AI & other heavy/slow/low-priority things at a slower rate (30 or 15 per second) yet keep the physics at a 60fps. They may have already decoupled those & still not been able to hit the 60 "game loops/ticks" per second on necessary elements to pull off 60fps.

If D2's frame-rate is CPU bound, perhaps they could still pull off 60fps in crucible? I don't see PvP carrying the same computational burden that PvE does with there being a lower # of combatants & objects to run logic for.