For those wondering the difference, FPS determines how smooth the animation runs. It’s most noticeable when you look at a high-end computer playing League of Legends, the animation is smooth as silk. A handful of games however run at 30FPS but the reasons are usually technical.
It was announced recently that the home console versions of Battlefield 3 would not support 1080p resolution or 60FPS. The reasons being that at its maximum potential, the PS3 and 360 cannot handle Battlefield 3 at its peak graphics despite being the most powerful home consoles released. Johan Andersson was asked about this, and he said “No, we always do 30fps on consoles, not possible to fit in the vehicles, fx, scale and all players otherwise.”
Comparing the two in terms of screenshots, I feel the difference in graphics is extremely subtle and the strength would be more in the smoothness of the game rather than the graphical quality which is a bigger deal for me than how it looks with today’s rendering technology.
DICE shared their reasoning behind the game running at 30FPS, saying “It’s not a technical challenge to get it to run at 60 but you have to scale back in some areas and we’re not willing to do that. We want to keep the core concept of what Battlefield is about and that means we’d rather stay with 30FPS because we are convinced that it is a good shooter experience there on 30FPS.”
In short, they can run it at 60FPS but they wont in order to retain the full gameplay. Gameplay over polygons anyday for me, I’d rather not play something where they gimped the gameplay to make it look pretty. To put it simply, running a game at 30fps greatly reduces the processing power needed to play the game on a console, as the number of things that need to be rendered come at a much slower pace, but at the cost of smoothness.
