For anyone that has been paying any amount of attention to gaming news since "Next Gen" became the "Current Gen" they would have at some point heard some comments about performance. Namely resolution and frame rate. The trend seems to be that the PS4 is able to out perform the Xbox one in both areas but in order to create a consistent experience between the systems, some game developers have ended up locking both to what ever the weakest platform is capable of.

"It seems obvious to me, there is no war on 60fps in essence, what we are actually dealing with is developers trying to make as much money as possible with as little cost as possible."

Now I would not normally care (at all) about what the console stats or benchmarks are. What I do care about, however, is that recently developers have been spouting rubbish about how 60fps is over rated and that 30fps gives a more "cinematic feel" and is in fact "more realistic" ...I wont go into the technical reasons as to why these statments are stupid, as this is nothing but an excuse for the current generations’ shortfalls. For example, Microsoft and Sony would probably not like Ubisoft saying “We wanted to make Assassins Creed 60fps and full HD but the console hasn’t got the stones to pull it off” ...Saying that you made the game that way on purpose is much more appeasing to manufacturers and consumers alike.

What has happened is that the games that are being developed are just too resource intensive or under optimised to work with the current gen hardware. This leaves the developers with two choices. They either re-develop the game and optimise it...or they compromise. Opting for compromise because it is cheaper and quicker leaves them with another choice, do they lower frame rate or resolution..or both? As a console is typically plugged into a television that is the other side of the room to the player, I would have opted for resolution...The trend however seems to be frame rate (hence this articles title).

I believe this has happened because of how the PS4 and the Xbox One were initially presented. At the unveilings of both consoles, the manufacturers listed FullHD and 60fps as a feature..something that would make most PC gamers smirk a little bit. These new consoles were presented like they were going to close the gap between console and PC; now that they are here, they are failing to deliver on that promise.

I digress, why do I care what troubles the consolites are facing? I have been playing games on my PC at 1080p 60+fps for years, why would this bother me?! Well..as part of the developers striding for a unified experience across platforms, PC games are being locked to 30fps! Why did this happen? How has it been allowed to happen?! It’s safe to say that I am not the only person to be frustrated by the situation. If you search Twitter you will see countless tweets from dismayed PC gamers about the lock.

To name a few games rumored/confirmed to be locked at 30fps: Assassin's Creed Unity, The Crew, Dead Rising 3, Need For Speed Rivals, The Evil Within...The list goes on.

Additionally, the ability to change advanced graphics settings (Anti Aliasing, Ambient Occlusion and VSync etc) have disappeared from select titles…No PC is the same, settings and configurations are tweaked to get the best performance on any given hardware, without these options modern games have started to perform badly on some less capable PC’s that would otherwise be fine.

It seems obvious to me, there is no war on 60fps in essence, what we are actually dealing with is developers trying to make as much money as possible with as little cost as possible. Why pay a programmer to change a game so that it’s graphics options are configurable if the console code already runs on PC? You wouldn’t, it doesn’t make good business sense. So what are we left with? Effectively we are running a direct port of the console game, what your gaming PC has become is an Xbox that can do spreadsheets.

But wait! a war needs two sides and we won’t go down without a fight. For every developer adding a limitation there is a modder that removes it. http://www.flawlesswidescreen.org/ and http://www.enbdev.com/ are dedicated to making PC gaming look and feel like it is supposed to, check them out!

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