Performance anxieties

Why are developers failing to deliver 60fps from hardware that promised to hit the mark?

Cast your mind back to 2020. As Sony and Microsoft promote their forthcoming consoles, which in some respects seem to represent the smallest graphical leap yet between generations, one feature stands out among all the talk of SSD storage and ray-traced reflections: a move to 60fps. Some games will even run in 120fps on these new machines, we’re told, a feat beyond even many gaming PCs when it comes to running contemporary blockbusters. With such assurances in place, it was easy to imagine that this smooth, fluid gameplay would characterise the next generation.

In 2023, then, there was a certain dissonance to the news that Redfall would launch in its Xbox Series incarnation with only a 30fps ‘quality’ mode, its 60fps ‘performance’ mode arriving at some point down the line. This, after all, is one of Microsoft’s big console exclusives for the year, and one of the first fruits born of its 2021 acquisition of Bethesda: why wouldn’t it be a poster child for the hardware’s capabilities?

In truth, however, Redfall is far from alone, joining the ranks of numerous 30fps releases of recent months, including A Plague Tale: Requiem and Gotham Knights. Just because it says ‘60fps’ somewhere on a console’s spec sheet, clearly that doesn’t mean every game will happily follow suit.

And yet optimising for consoles has been a long-standing challenge. Game development is by definition an iterative process, and certainties such as framerate performance have always tended to emerge at the 11th hour. Two generations ago, a more modest 30fps was the target for most developers – and even then it wasn’t always delivered. But expectations change along with technology, and talk of framerates has never been noisier than it is today.