Football Games: 60 FPS for 360, 30 FPS for PS3
- Scribbled on July 2nd, 2007 by Jonah Falcon
- Filed in Industry News, Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3, Sports, WTF
1Up as has reported the shocking news that the upcoming football games (American football, to our fussy European neighbors) Madden NFL 2008, NCAA Football 2008 and All-Pro Football 2K8 will be running at a smooth 60 fps on the Xbox 360, and a less smooth 30 fps on the PlayStation 3 - at the same resolution.
Why is this? The Xbox 360’s flexible RAM? The DirectX language? The murky PS3 architecture? The difficult programming language?
Sega remained mum, and Todd Sitrin, EA’s vice president of marketing sports branding, stated:
We want to make sure that we give the best experience we can on each platform. In designing a game, there are all sorts of tradeoffs that include frame rate, visuals, features, AI, etc. Football is an extremely challenging sport to replicate because of the number of people on the field, their interaction, and the scope of the environments. As you can see, every company making a football game this year made a decision that the best experience for the Xbox 360 included 60fps whereas the best experience for the PS3 was 30fps. We certainly believe that both the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions are our football products are outstanding experiences and recommend that each gamer look at the entire experience, not just one aspect. We think they’ll be very happy no matter which version of the game they play.
Which tells us nothing.
Whatever the case, this is a blow for the more expensive machine to once again fail to match, much less exceed, its less expensive counterpart’s output.
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:53 am
Difficult hardware. DirectX makes development easier but doesn’t make FPS higher.
It may also be the 1080p output, that’s a lot of stuff to push to the screen when the hardware is new to you.
End result, Microsoft has always supported their developers well (I’ve worked for years on DirectX and for standard applications). Their documentation is solid (unless you’re doing obscure stuff), they give you enough access to hardware to optimize it, and their libraries make coding easy.
The amount of CPU, GPU’s and components on the PS3 probably require a great deal of synchronization (mutual exclusion locking) and creative coding. That means, you have to think a lot harder and get creative when developing for complex technology–especially when its fresh on the market and their are no gurus.
Once you’ve worked with it for a few years and you know the in’s and the out’s you’ll be able to write your own internal libraries for a lot of hard work. For instance, when I talked with a guy at GDC a few years ago and I asked him what he did on the PS2 he said “water.” That was it, his job was to make the best looking water with all the physics that goes with it. Then, that work would be utilized in all games that had water. Write once, use many.
Now, with everything being new, this has to be re-done. Developers will perfect water, explosions, environmental effects and all that. In the years to come they’ll be able to put it all together to make solid games with all the levels of power you’d expect from the hardware.
As it is now, you’re lucky their R&D teams are finishing games in a few years with virgin hardware.
Now, my concerns… when running at 30FPS (32 was a VCR, right) you’ll look fine–smooth maybe, but screen transitions or high intense AI may slow it down or make it choppy for a few seconds or less. Thinking about switching from the field view to your team formations and positions. There may be a hesitation on screen draw or something.
There are ways to work around those “lags” to prepare the screens for display, but all that has to be taken into account so you don’t drop one or two frames.
When running at 60FPS you can afford to drop five or ten frames during “hard times” such as a huge explosion, a large crowd AI (Assassins’ Creed for example) and other intense operations without the user noticing a reduce frame rate. But when you’re on the edge of visible notice, it’s risky to drop a frame or two.
July 2nd, 2007 at 10:58 am
Thing is the first few next-gen Ea football games all ran around 30fps on the 360 because at the time EA had not developed on the hardware.
This isn’t a huge blow for Sony because even if Madden, NCAA, and All-Pro were running at 60fps the PS3 doesn’t have enough units sold to come close to the number that the 360 will sell.
As long as Madden(Aug.14th) and NCAA(July 17th) are on the PS2 then it will be the platform that pushes the most sales for the games on any console.
July 25th, 2007 at 5:12 am
Its because of a higher resolution output. You can can get resolution and depth to run smooth at30fps easy. Halo is a good example of this. The only reason halo looks so smooth and good, and has a great draw distance for a home system FPS. Is it runs at 30 fps. 30fps is not really a problem. But when you get slowdown like when the Xbox “for some reason” could not run NCAA football 05. And had slow downs around 15fps or less. And the PS2 was running it at much higher level. No one could figure out why that was either. It was not like PS2 hardware was killing Xbox hardware. It will be a good brag area for this new creed of gamers. A group that seems to think non diversity is the key to gaming evolution. But the PS3 is a amazing but confusing piece of work. And with the hope that gaming will move past 15 year old FPSers. That are burning out faster every second of every day. Gamers can only hope they use at least 50% of that monster machine soon.