Nvidia has released a new video in which Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney shares his thoughts about Nvidia’s new G-Sync technology. According to Sweeney, G-Sync will free Epic Games from making the decision of locking a game at 30fps. This should be good news for all those of us who hate 30fps capped titles (Ghost Games and NFS: Rivals, I’m looking at you).
As Sweeney said when Nvidia’s Tom Petersen asked him about the advantages of G-Sync for Epic Games:
“With every game we always face the start decision of doing aim for 60 frames per second or run at 30. When we decide to run at 30 we had to make this unfortunate conscious decision to not ever run at more than 30 because there is nothing worse in a game switching back and forth from 30 – which is fairly pleasing – to 60, and then back. Because when you make that transition you see the big problems there. And so G-Sync really frees us from having to make this one hard decision for our entire game. It enables us to, you know, target a continuum of framerates during gameplay on different computers. It gives each gamer the best experience their computer is capable delivering.”
I know, I know – why Epic Games does not take advantage of triple buffering? And why should they make that decision themselves when PC gamers can upgrade their computers to hit the constant 60fps mark – provided a game is properly optimized for our platform (Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag I’m looking at you right now)? I mean, PC is not a closed platform so why lock the framerate? To avoid jitters? Here is an idea – how about offering a 30fps, a 60fps and an unlimited fps option? Hell, Capcom has already done such a thing with its SFIV series.
In short, that answer was as amateurish as it could get. Obviously Tim Sweeney tried to hype G-Sync – and yes, we are certain that the overall experience will be great with such a monitor – but his example was as awful as it could get. There is no reason AT ALL for developers to lock the framerate of their games. This, on the other hand, does not mean that developers should get away with shoddy ports that do not take advantage of our hardware.
All in all, if G-Sync is an excuse for developers to stop locking their games at 30fps, then kudos to the green team. However, there is no reason at all to lock them in the first place.
And that is that.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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