The 30FPS Debate: Is Frame Rate a Deal-Breaker?

How many frames do you like in your seconds? The speed at which games unreel has, in recent times, grown into a rabidly contested topic. In one corner are those who believe that more is better – that twice the frames means twice the game. The other corner is home to folks who either take it as it comes, don’t notice, or even prefer a lower number. But who is right? Is 30 frames per second perfectly fine? Or should we crane our necks away from anything below 60 frames per second, lubricating our corneas with eye drops?

The launch of the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X has changed the expectations of many, who have grown accustomed to the glassy flow of 60fps. The problem being that, while the new consoles have been humming away in our living rooms since late 2020, many of the games of this generation have still had one foot in the last. We are living in a pandemic-lengthened overlap. Once the generation really kicks off – when Unreal Engine 5, with its billions of rocks and traceable rays, makes its way into more games, say – 30fps may, once again, be the norm on consoles. This debate was recently stoked into a blaze by Starfield, Bethesda’s upcoming sci-fi behemoth, which will be locked to 30fps on Xbox.

Bethesda’s games are not usually lauded for their technical supremacy. Traditionally, a new Fallout game doesn’t so much launch, with a nice clean bang, as leak and blow toward us – its glimpses of beauty all glued together with bugs and jitters. Personally, I wouldn’t have it any other way; there has always been something charming about a game that looks as if it had busted free of containment, its ideas still glowing with hot potential. They are then, by custom, patched and cooled into place after release. Starfield, however, is different. For one thing, its vision – a multifarious string of planets, vacuum-sealed in starred belts of space – is unlike anything Bethesda has done before. It is graphically lustrous. For another, there are raised stakes, after the crummy reception that greeted Redfall. Xbox players want a first-rate blockbuster, and they don’t want their enjoyment belted and buckled by a limited frame rate.

Contrast the PlayStation showcase, from a few weeks back, and the absence of fuss around the Spider-Man 2 gameplay demo, which ran in 30fps. This is likely down to a couple of reasons. One, like its predecessors, that game will probably launch with a 60fps mode, in which its more supple features – the rich detail, the dynamic reflections – are squeezed in favour of silkier movement. Two, and more important, it looked great. Whenever I play Spider-Man or its sequel at 60fps, I’m met with the strange suspicion that I am watching a low-budget documentary. It reminds me of the weird and fleeting fad of 48fps movies, from around a decade ago. One of the films that released with that option was The Amazing Spider-Man, in which Andrew Garfield looped through the boroughs at double the rate of Tobey Maguire, with half the impact. Watch that movie at the standard 24fps, though, and it tightens into focus, clad in cinematic silk.

Likewise, I played God of War Ragnarök at 30fps and found it sublime. It glittered with that movie-like frost that melts away at higher frame rates. It always irked me that The Last of Us Remastered didn’t offer 30fps for those in thrall to the toasted smoulder of the original; the sped-up gloss of the remaster seemed to strip something out, dousing its motions with fluidity. Praise be to developer Ember Lab, who, for Kena: Bridge of Spirits, opted to deliver its cutscenes at 24fps, glazing it with a Hollywood burnish. The game itself spooled forth at 60fps, should you so wish, but the story was locked, lifted by the lack of frames into the realm of a dream. As for Shedworks, the studio behind Sable, the movements of its heroine were trapped in flickers, as though she were out of step with the world, threatening to gutter out onto the air.

Often, whether you prefer 30fps or 60fps comes down to genre. First-person games tend to benefit from the doubled-up image of 60fps, with its darting immediacy. Similarly, racing games suit the added frame intake – owing to their fixation on finely shaved seconds, and scenery that gets licked into a haze of velocity. The point, really, is that the number of frames per second is about more than mere technical oomph; it is an artistic decision, as well as a matter of taste. In the end, it has more to do with your frame of mind.