Giant Bomb: I'm calling you out for your graphical snootiness! Cut it out!

Playing action games at 30fps feels bad, especially after playing at 60fps or more for a while.

Also, we can link to our youtube channels now?

Ok. Trying to get as many of these as possible. The quote system here is not great!

How much does this really matter, though? There was time, when graphics were more inconsistent between platforms, that the IGNs and Gamespots of the world would issue articles where graphics were an actual issue, LIKE the Bethesda titles on PS3. These days, it seems that everything that can be construed as an annoyance and (now) measured is used, as you say, as a weight for/against purchase. An inconsistent framerate was rarely an actual issue in grading or enjoying games until the framerate got high enough. Going between 5-20 fps wasn't an issue, going between 45-60 is some kind of dealbreaker.

I think we're absolutely running into the limits of human perception here. I know we can interpret input up to 1/235ths of a second or something like that, but obviously there are diminishing returns. _I_ can see the difference between 60fps and 30fps, but I'm also at the point where I'd rather play at a higher resolution (4K) than 60fps because reducing aliasing means more than framerate. Eventually games will do both and it won't be a big deal. And then there's, as we've been talking about through this thread, the matter of consistency and as a small-time game developer, I don't hold it against developers who can't always keep it together when pushing the envelope in terms of assets because it is a complex resource-managing task. I'm not saying that games should chop up to 3fps during intense moments, but having it sway between 25-30fps as action picks up isn't really a big deal.

Really? They're obviously not diving into into FSAA and stuff like that, but they do have plenty of hot takes about frame rates and resolution.

I didn't say he said something was "unplayable", but I trust JEff for his opinion and he was flat-out wrong in his take.

It actually makes me more concerned about my own hardware. I built this PC for about $1800 four years ago and it runs GTAV at 4K/steady 30fps, which is great, except it hitches for a second or two as I move through the world, which is something I was not expecting and makes me appreciate the asset load masking of the version on 15 year old hardware even more. It's noticeable, but where else am I going to play it without basically building a new machine? I've read Ars Technica/Tom's Hardware articles where this is just a fact of life about seek times through a PC.

I remember the resolution arguments of that first HD generation, but I think it goes back to your first sentence: on a big enough TV all differences are noticeable. All resolution is imperceptible to a whole lot of people beyond a certain TV/room size difference. People started finding out about the Lechner distance when they started seeing things that actually weren't there. I remember when 4K sets started showing up in demo rooms and you either had to be close enough to it to appreciate the difference or it had to be large enough to see it at a distance.

I'm not trying to dismiss others experiences, but coming from a background where people said they saw a difference between a $10 and a $60 HDMI cable, I don't know of anyone would be able to, in a double-blind test, distinguish between 900p and 1080p. This isn't like the PGR3 controversy of yore where the game was running at 600p, which was literally just above standard definition resolution. Certainly it was a lot harder back in 2013 when it was an actual controversy and TVs were more expensive/smaller than they are now.

If I could present visual evidence for my argument without making it look like I'm spamming for the YouTube channel I make negative dollars off of, then I would (but also, I'm biased because there's some other really cool content I worked really hard on on there, and I think most of the internet's self-promotion rules are 'letter of the law' as opposed to 'spirit of the law', so... that's a whole other ball of yarn).

Someone made the absurd argument on my YouTube video that if the Switch version was going to be so compromised, why make a Switch version. Well, why make any version of any game then if it's not running the game with all of its assets in play with the shiniest frame rate, in 4K/8K? All versions of any game are a compromise if they're not running on the absolute most powerful processing device possible - namely, a rack-mounted super computer, but for realism, let's say it's your home desktop. That's just reality. What it comes down to beyond obvious performance issues is picking nits. Jeff saying a game that runs at a solid 30fps "doesn't run super well" is the pickiest of nits and it's the statement he was the most enthusiastic about expressing. Would I pay $40 for a Saints Row: The Third remaster nine years after I bought and beat it and made it my game of the year? No, obviously not, even if the game were running 60fps in 4K, that's completely irrelevant. That thing better have a whole other campaign's worth of content or some big new mode for that kind of money.

And thanks on the $$$ situation, it'll be great to have more perspectives (and games!) to play again.

To your first point: I disagree entirely and I know and appreciate the difference between solid 30fps/60fps. To each their own, I suppose, but 30fps is still industry standard and it still works really damn well.

And I wish we could link to YouTube channels. I spend dozens of hours making some of my videos and they articulate my thoughts on a subject far more than text in this message box ever could.

@npfeifer: I mean I'm telling you how much it matters to me and I don't see how I could be any clearer.

This all keeps coming back, ultimately, to these things don't bother you therefore they are unimportant. Or some sort of weird idea that it doesn't matter if things have gotten better or we should expect them to be better because once upon a time we put up with situations that were worse.

Frankly your position is baffling to me.

lmfao wtf is even going on?

I was super excited to play Outer Worlds when it came out. Huge Obsidian fan, huge New Vegas fan, it was getting major accolades. Couldn't wait.

But this was before a recent system upgrade and it ran super bad. By every estimate you've provided here it was "playable", I'd get around the mid 40 fps maybe 50 in specific places. But it had a tendency to take real sharp turns if things got busy and it would feel horrible to play. So I stopped playing it and move on to something else, I opted not to push though something that was kind of bumming me out.

@huntad: OP has an opinion he feels very strongly about, but i don't think anyone agrees with him.
Honestly i'm moved by the dedication he has shown towards his defence, regardless of who is right or wrong he rides on a tidal wave of belief, and it is us who will be swept away by his righteousness.

The GB crew (Jeff especially) has mentioned time and time again that a good, consistent frame rate not only makes a game more playable but also ages more gracefully than sub-30 FPS game. I agree - game mechanics aside I would rather watch a 60 FPS PS1 game than a 22 FPS 360 game.

I have only one eye, for all intents and purposes, so there's that.

Haha, I know right? If only I had half the conviction in my own beliefs that @npfeifer has shown in this thread. Unfortunately, I tend to know when I'm pissing in the wind.

Just get a loan and buy a new video card, jesus

People: This matters to me.

OP: nah, stop lying.

I came across the Saints Row bombcast discussion and i disagree that Jeff was the most enthusiast about how 'unplayable' it was. As if his main message was that people should therefore not play it. Brad mentioned how people are buzzing about this being such a good remaster and Jeff just didn't agree at all with that. Because to Jeff, if your remaster of a 9 year old game is not 60 fps that's dissapointing to him. He did acknowledge that they did a lot of work to the visuals, but he wasn't sure if it was good enough to warrant the 40$ asking price. The visuals weren't suddenly good enough that it felt like a modern look to him.

But he also mentioned that most of the humor still lands pretty well, and how the game has a real heart to it and you can tell that the devs had a good time working on it and that makes the game personable in a way that hardly any games are. The inclusion of pop-culture, current songs soundtracking missions, the way characters talk to eachother, the in-jokes of singing that Sublime song with Pierce in the car etc. At the end he did mention he might actually play quite a bit of it because he does like the game a whole lot (way more than SR2 , which is too much about Johnny Gat in his book) and it's sort of refreshing to play an 'old-skool' open world game like that

opening this screed with a louis ck quote sure was a choice

@npfeifersaid:

I think we're absolutely running into the limits of human perception here. I know we can interpret input up to 1/235ths of a second or something like that, but obviously there are diminishing returns. _I_ can see the difference between 60fps and 30fps, but I'm also at the point where I'd rather play at a higher resolution (4K) than 60fps because reducing aliasing means more than framerate. Eventually games will do both and it won't be a big deal. And then there's, as we've been talking about through this thread, the matter of consistency and as a small-time game developer, I don't hold it against developers who can't always keep it together when pushing the envelope in terms of assets because it is a complex resource-managing task. I'm not saying that games should chop up to 3fps during intense moments, but having it sway between 25-30fps as action picks up isn't really a big deal.

So I think you sort of contradicted your own argument in this response. You say you can see the difference between 30 and 60 fps, but you'd rather play a game in at 4K 30fps than at 1080p 60fps because "reducing aliasing means more than framerate."

You're saying that your opinion is that aliasing and resolution matter more to you than framerate. I can tell you that for me, framerate always matters more than resolution, and sometimes matters more than aliasing. It's all personal preference based on your own perception. What seems to bother you is that Jeff and others don't share your personal preference. That's just life, though. Jeff doesn't share my preference in games, so when it comes to game reviews, I generally take his with a grain of salt. It doesn't mean I can't enjoy the content he puts out, just means I probably won't read any of his reviews, or put too much weight into his critical opinions on games in the podcasts and videos. And that's fine. I'm not going to put him on blast on a public forum because he is negative toward pretty much every MMO he plays, which is a genre I particularly enjoy. I'll get annoyed to myself when he talks about it on a podcast in a way that tells me he maybe didn't take the time to understand a system or something like that, but that's as far as it goes because I understand that not everyone shares my taste in games. Same should apply to how you feel about technical opinions. If you know someone really favors a high framerate for their games, and complains (even in a professional sense), you know that particular opinion doesn't match up with your own, so you probably shouldn't put too much weight in deciding whether a game is worth checking out based on that person's opinion alone.

Edit: To be clear, in that last part, I'm not trying to tell you how you should feel. No one should do that. I'm simply trying to get across why I think many in this thread are so strongly opposed to your critique of Jeff and others for their technical preferences.

I just want to say that the idea that Saints Row the Third Remaster ran "rock solid" in the quick look is demonstratively false. Just skipping frame by frame through a couple of scenes makes it obvious frames are repeated, and they're not repeated consistently like you'd get with 30fps in a 60fps video. The framerate seems to be jumping around a bit. Now, this could be because it's recorded at home, so maybe something got inconsistent there, but that would mean you also can't judge that it's "rock solid" from this video. This might seem like a nitpick, but I hate it when people say a framerate is rock solid and then it's all over the place. Something like Forza Horizon does a rock solid framerate well, by having absolutely accurate frame timings at 30fps, and I have no problem playing that at 30fps.

@npfeifer: Yeah. Most will hate on you for speaking Facts but its just another critics vs consumers thing. The critics aren't lying, they do see poor performance cause they buy the best. Jeff is getting more humbled as people are reiterating that most won't have the pc he has even if it's considered "cheap". I remember growing up and gaming on a laptop that cost 900 bucks that I saved to get. It was my pride and joy. Technically outdated by others standard the day I brought it. Pushed to the limit to get Skyrim running on it. Had to shrink the screen and lower resolution etc. 30 fps was something I dreamt of. Finally, I got a decent 20 fps and was happy. Then you go online and read how anything under 60 fps is throw up worthy. Texture pop-in is disgusting. The game lags by a microsecond yauk. Its become so elitist that I think much don't notice.

That said, I get why people who have paid top dollar expect top dollar performance. So these gripes stand out more. It's just a weird disconnect I wish GB and other outlets acknowledged more. The same disconnect I get when GB and others play couch coop or Mario makers like sharing levels games that never quite pan out in the fun department unless you have their influencer position or a job with tons of friends who aren't too busy to hop on a couch and laugh and play for a few. I have my own issues and notice when I'm telling my friends how easy something is and forget not everyone has my experience and have to call myself out as well.

Yeah, digital foundry thankfully has gotten less negative about performance and is more uplifting lately. I enjoy the low specs gamer cause he speaks for, lack of a better word, non glorious system or low pc players. He talks about barely pushing 30 fps on the lowest settings and workarounds for people who don't need 4k textures to get excited. Again thou, not GB's fault, it's expected and they feel obligated to speak on the top performance cause their audience is assumed running those things even if its some 1% crap of gamers running the best pc even if they all say they do.

Also here's a hint If you own all 3 consoles and a gaming PC your not falling into the camp of the average gamer. Your more critic side and those fps ect will drive you crazy so jeff's take is perfect. OP is more for people that that stuff doesn't hurt.

This repeated 'back in my day' aspect of this is really weird.

Like yes I also used to play games on older machines that could only dream of the performance you should get today. That doesn't mean anything though. It doesn't mean that you should be happy with middling because you used to get by on much worse.

I used to play multiplayer games on a 56k modem. A terrible ping now is probably something I would have given anything for back then but doesn't mean that right now it isn't still bad.

@topcyclist:

People are not 'hating' on OP for speaking facts, (Not sure what's factual about performance not impacting people's enjoyment and DF making a living clowning on graphical performance when their video has placed the SR3 remaster in a better light instead), they are just asking him to consider that humans might not all be alike and have things impact them the exact same way.

I'm sure that most of us have been into gaming as kids. We've all had times or might still be in a situation where we don't have the cash to have a top of the line PC at all times, or we played a badly made port. Most of us have put up with less-than-ideal versions of games and still managed to play through it and enjoy it. Pretty much anyone that played MGS4 or Demon Souls knows that feeling. The devs made a game for the current box of hardware, made some choices here and there, hit the deadline and shipped out games that are complete enough, yet don't always perform as well as the standard set by other games. But we make do with it because a game is more than the performance only. Just like a book still can be read if the pages are wet, you can still get the gist of a song through a 128kbps Mp3 file or watch a new movie on their 20 year old CRT TV. It would still annoy and diminish the experience for me though.

So when you come across a remaster of a 9 year old game, and you have splurged the cash on a system that runs the newest games far beyond 60 fps, you wonder why this 9 old multiplatform game still struggles so hard to achieve that. Clearly it's not a problem that you can spend your way out, it's a quirk of the software itself. Unacceptable is a harsh word by Jeff and the one that gets laser-focused on in this thread, but it would at least be a disappointment to me. That shouldn't be that hard to sympathize with, i feel? But instead you see a ton of people tell them that these things matter to them, and that just doesn't get acknowledged at all. As if all these people are lying to themselves.

And the silly thing is that if you go through the whole discussion (which i have documented here before) you would come away with the feeling that this is the best way to experience SR3 and it's still a ton of fun to play. Jeff even said he wanted to spend more time with the game!

@nodima: Not surprised that this got so negative. GB fans really dislike when you speak negatively about the team. Which is fair. I don't think op was trying to speak meanly just making the post more jokie but the fans took it way past his or her original meaning. He or she is just saying for him and many that can't afford better current setups, the graphics hang-ups that GB goes on and on about don't bother him and the people like him are drowned out by people saying how bad anything looks on sub-optimal performance. Those same discussions also push a lot of people to not buy games thus lowering the discussion and fans or the chance for sequels to games that have good qualities but were made by a smaller company or big one that's overworked to squeeze out perfect optimization for the 1% that pixel counts performance. I know plenty of gamers that only by sports games and digital foundry no matter how much you tell him, won't affect his decision. Constant updates on bad loot boxes, work practices, etc never affect him. OP is talking for the baseline gamer that just plays and will overlook small fps drops in heavy action, like the kid you were when PSX first came out. You weren't pouting for every bad pop in etc. That said, this is a gaming site so its assumed enthusiast are on it, so I expected most (didn't think it would be all) will think this post is stupid and they all like info on performance even if it almost always falls into GET IT ON PC then the second strongest counsel you own and so on. It's also nice to go in-depth with games like crew does. Like arguing the merits of a movie past it just being fun. Sometimes it just sounds like the same argument, fps dipped, its bad, etc. Jeff and the team have noticed this thou and on many occasions said it will be fine for people who only have switch etc. Like how he acknowledged MK11 was bad looking on switch but it gets the job done if you have to be on the go and eventually will overlook the downgrade.

@topcyclist: I don't think very many people here are even that focused on the criticism towards Jeff. The primary point of contention here is stop telling people something doesn't matter while they repeatedly tell you how much it matters to them and why.

I legit have not seen this much arguing over grpahics on a forum since like 2015. What the hell is going on.

I'll tell you what did happen to me. During that PS5 reveal, I wasn't really taken back much by the graphics but the Last of Us 2 footage has legitimately knocked my socks off.

I'm getting harder to impress these days but it still happens. Thanks, videogames and the people that make them.

@efesell: Ok, I got ya. yeah, I can see how it is obviously a factor. I have become aware of fps more after purchasing stronger gaming stuff. Kinda goes with my hypothesis thou. I think I'm privileged with the opportunity to notice those things now and seek or demand they improve whereas I think Poster is coming from a place where he couldn't improve the bad fps etc so he or she just dealt with it. So hearing how bad something looks, when he or she takes it as great, may annoy them. I wish post was worded so I can get it better but I also think the poster was joking mostly. Jeff obviously has to cater to his demo and mention stuff that affects them, and most on here are big into the hobby and have the means to pick the product with the best fps or make decisions to avoid games with bad fps etc. Overall, I still think its a hard starting point to post a post-bad-mouthing a site's owner on their own site if you want constructive critics from the site fans, lol.

@onemanarmyy: Yeah I see your point. I still think OP was joking mostly. Obviously most PC gamers wanna know if a game runs well. System too. Also not having it run well or even being a bit off will affect most gamers and fans of GB. I think he or she was specifically going off the idea of people who have little choice in systems or pc and are able to put up with bad graphics. Just like there are tons here saying they care, im sure on low spec gamer or something you could find tons agreeing with the poster or some of the poster's stuff and say they barely get 15 fps and are happy.