Wargaming Dev Explains Why Developers Struggle To Maintain A Balance Between Resolution and FPS

From a developer’s perspective, 1080p and 60fps hasn’t exactly been a norm for this console generation. Several games struggle to run at 1080p at 30fps let alone 60fps. Although there have been a few exceptions such as Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain on the PS4, by large game developers have struggled to achieve the right balance between fps performance and rendering the amount of pixels.

When we look back at the launch of the consoles, developers were excited about the amount of memory and decent GPUs found in the new consoles. So why are developers struggling to maintain a good balance between frame rate and resolution?

“This happens every generation,” TJ Wagner, Creative Director at WarGaming said to GamingBolt. “The hardware is so fast, we can do anything. In the end it just means more of everything (more textures, more polys, more FX, more lighting) and you’re back to the same old performance problems.”

This essentially means that developers will aim for more and more post processing effects and improving texture quality. A great example is the recent Star Wars Battlefront which prioritized frame rate performance and post processing effects over resolution. This resulted into sub HD rendering solution on both the PS4 and Xbox One.

WarGaming’s upcoming game for the PS4, World of Tanks will not be running at 60fps on the console. TJ confirmed that the game will run at 1080p and 30fps. “After all its 30fps with highly detailed tanks on large maps with explosions and what not going off all the time. For 60fps we’d have to get rid of destruction, do simple physics and FX to maintain the visual quality and that would affect the feel of the core gameplay. World of Tanks is also not a twitch shooter, so it wouldn’t benefit greatly from the changes,” Wagner explains.

It’s an interesting case of maintaining the trade-off between rendering the game at a higher resolution and achieving higher frame rate. It depends on the game and core details that are prioritized by the game developers. Needless to say, that it will be quite a long time before we actually see games rendered at a native 1080p resolution and 60fps consistently this generation.