Starfield's performance is locked on Xbox, Todd Howard says, causing worry about the space sim on PC, but a God of War Ragnarok dev comes to Bethesda’s defense.
It depends on what the bottleneck is. If it’s a GPU issue, then yeah they could just drop the resolution and/or lower graphics settings to hit 60fps. But if it’s a CPU issue, then it becomes much more difficult to improve performance. Many of their systems may have a fixed CPU cost to even function at all, which makes optimization more challenging.
Ideally you would choose your FPS target early on in development, so you have an idea of what limitations you have. But then you also have to take into consideration the ridiculously long development times of these large projects, where the hardware your game needs to be optimized against doesn’t even exist yet, and won’t for several years. It’s all very messy, and it becomes progressively easier to say- you know what? screw it, cap it at 30.
It depends on what the bottleneck is. If it’s a GPU issue, then yeah they could just drop the resolution and/or lower graphics settings to hit 60fps. But if it’s a CPU issue, then it becomes much more difficult to improve performance. Many of their systems may have a fixed CPU cost to even function at all, which makes optimization more challenging.
Ideally you would choose your FPS target early on in development, so you have an idea of what limitations you have. But then you also have to take into consideration the ridiculously long development times of these large projects, where the hardware your game needs to be optimized against doesn’t even exist yet, and won’t for several years. It’s all very messy, and it becomes progressively easier to say- you know what? screw it, cap it at 30.