PS4 ICE Team Programmer: Anything Below 720p/30fps Is Actively Unpleasant

Cort Stratton who is a programmer at Naughty Dog and also a part of Sony’s secret ICE team, has shared his thoughts on frame rate and resolution. This generation has been more focused on resolution and frame rate wars compared to any other generation in the past.

Cort Stratton has added his own opinions into the matter stating that anything below 720p resolution and 30 frames per second is “actively unpleasant.” He also believes that “anything higher isn’t necessarily a clear improvement,” in an interview with Polygon. He personally prefers high resolution over frame rate since according to him it does not make much difference when the game runs above 30fps.

Dropping the frame rate from 60 to 30 fps results into a gain of of 16 milliseconds of frame time and he rather use it “to make the game world significantly more beautiful/fun/rich/complex/awesome, instead of wasting it all to make the game marginally more responsive to player input.”

It is important to note that Cort Stratton is also one of the developers working on the PSSL, which is the PS4 API for rendering game, so it is interesting to know about his thoughts about frame rate and resolution. However his statement does not necessarily apply to PS4 games development since each game has a different vision. This goes to show that at the end of the day the developers can make cuts in frame rate or/and resolution to be faithful to the vision of the game. What are your thoughts on this matter? Let us know in the comments section  below.