Last week saw the release of two new games that do not support 60 frames per second gaming on PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series consoles, Gotham Knights and A Plague Tale: Requiem. Many would argue that one of the greatest wins from the new wave of consoles has been that the majority of titles support 60fps – or even 120fps – representing a game-changing improvement over the last-gen standard 30fps. The question is why this brace of titles do not support this option and whether it signifies the beginning of the end of 60fps as a standard for console gaming.
It’s a tricky question to answer, but ultimately, I feel it is inevitable that the proliferation of 60fps support will slack off significantly – not least because so many titles are looking to tap into the full array of features offered by Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, which sets the stage for a new 3D rendering paradigm. We’ve already had our first taste of the kind of fidelity UE5 offers thanks to last year’s phenomenal demo – The Matrix Awakens – based on an early rendition of the engine’s features. Lumen, tapping into hardware-accelerated ray tracing features, delivers an astonishingly realistic lighting solution, while Nanite offers a level of geometric detail in excess of traditional rendering.
It’s quite unlike anything we’ve seen before, but the point is that the demo runs at an inconsistent 30fps during gameplay, while cutscenes are actually operating at a literally cinematic 24fps. Both CPU and GPU are put through the wringer here, so simply scaling down resolution to improve frame-rate will not help much.
