Is 720 60 good enough?

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IndeedCodyBrown

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Edited By IndeedCodyBrown

Poll Is 720 60 good enough? (435 votes)

Yes 33%
No, I need at least 1080 30 14%
No, I need at least 1080 60 46%
No, I need at least 4k because I am a being of the future. Kneel before me. 3%
What? I don't play video games where am I? 4%

I feel weird because recent talk of resolution and framerate seems a bit unnecessary to me. I would be happy still with games that run at 720 60 and having other hardware power going into more complex systems and gameplay mechanics. Is this just me?

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Ezekiel

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4K is absurd for gaming and FHD is kind of low res for things other than movies and TV shows. I prefer QHD. But, whatever makes you happy.

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monetarydread

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#2  Edited By monetarydread

Nope. Maybe I have been spoiled with PC gaming, or maybe the scaler just sucks on my TV, but 720p looks like blurry, pixelated trash. I think that the native resolution of a TV/monitor should be the standard and if a developer cannot make that happen, then they should scale back on graphical effects, not lower the resolution.

Also, I have a 4k IPS monitor as a second monitor (mostly for photoshop work) and even though my computer cannot run 4k games properly when it can the games look marvelous. Maybe 1440p is a better step forward, but once I have seen WOW running at 4k, it's hard to go back to playing it on a 1080p monitor.

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BoOzak

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#3  Edited By BoOzak

No it isnt just you. I still use a 720p TV because I just dont care that much about resolution. That and it's hooked up to a bunch of SD consoles that seem to look okay on that TV.

As long as I can read the text on the screen and the game plays well i'm happy. I like that some PSPro games might be offering the choice between upressed graphics and better framerate but I doubt many games will give you that option. The best bet for priortizing framerate would be buying a decent PC but even then some games are locked.

All that being said I could see myself buying an OLED TV in the future just because the colour seems so much more vibrant and crisp.

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Savage

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I've been doing all my console gaming for the last 11 years on a 720p TV, and I continue to be satisfied with that. I don't care about graphics technology (art and framerate are all that matter to me about a game's appearance), and I play more old games than new games. On PC, I've been running at 1200p60 for a number of years now and that suits me just fine.

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Ezekiel

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@savage said:

I've been doing all my console gaming for the last 11 years on a 720p TV, and I continue to be satisfied with that. I don't care about graphics technology (art and framerate are all that matter to me about a game's appearance)

Then wouldn't it be nice if you could see the art more clearly?

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ShaggE

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1080 and above is great, but I'm totally okay with 720. I play so many old games that I'm used to 320x200, haha.

Same goes for 60fps. Great when you can get it, but I never see it as a necessity. I can even get used to below 30, in an absolute pinch.

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Justin258

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#7  Edited By Justin258

1080p60 is the ideal minimum, but I'd take 720p60 over 1080p30 any day.

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ivdamke

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I can't remember the last time I played a game sub 1080/60. I think it would probably be Bloodborne as that's the last console game I remember playing, that experience left much to be desired on the technical side of things. So 1080/60 has become my expected minimum and I'll jack it up to 1440DSR/60 if my PC allows it on certain games.

That being said, reducing the resolution won't automatically provide the resources required for more complex game systems.

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ShadyPingu

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#10  Edited By ShadyPingu

I don't even know what resolution my TV is capable of displaying. And as long as the frame rate is consistent enough to not impede play, I don't really make a fuss. You're not the only one who's fine with "good enough."

I'd caution against just assuming that a developer could just funnel all those unused p's into other areas of the game, though.

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mike

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#11  Edited By mike

@mambogator said:

With frame rate, it's easy to see the difference between 30 and 60 FPS, but your brain can't differentiate between anything much higher than that.

As someone who owns a 144hz display, I can tell you that is not the case at all. Once you sit down in front of one you'll know and appreciate the difference, it is significant. In my experience the people who say things like the brain can't tell the difference much higher than 60 FPS don't own a high refresh rate monitor and have probably never even used one.

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guanophobic

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#12  Edited By guanophobic

@mike: As an owner of a 165hz display, i wholeheartedly agree. I would say it's getting harder to tell a difference from 120hz and upwards, but it's absolutely noticeable.

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GStats

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1080p 60fps is desirable. Doubt we'll ever see that consistently though given how many new graphical techniques they're desperate to pile onto things.

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fnrslvr

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I can't distinguish between 30fps and 60fps unless the mechanics are very framey (fighting games) and I can't really distinguish between 720p and 1080p unless I'm looking at them side by side, so 720p30 is sufficient for me most of the time. So, uh, I guess I don't know why I'm building a high-end PC and putting a 1070 into it. GPGPU stuff, maybe. Or free Gears 4. Oh, I hate load times, that's a good reason.

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audioBusting

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I've played lots of games at 720/30 and it's totally fine... Sometimes it's easy to forget in our video games bubble that high end video game rendering is a luxury.

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WynnDuffy

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#16  Edited By WynnDuffy

1440P 60 minimum now for me but always nice to get well above 60 as I have a 165Hz display.

People that say they can't see the difference between 30 and 60 FPS...well, I'm not sure but that sounds like you have an impairment.

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GundamGuru

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#17  Edited By GundamGuru

More resolution is definitely helpful. Text is easier to read. Details in the distance are sharper. It also depends on your distance to the screen and the physical size of it. There are thresholds for diminishing returns, of course. As for fps, it does depend on the game (Civ for instance is playable at nearly any fps), but even going from 60 fps in games to 24 fps movies is night and day.

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Shivoa

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#18  Edited By Shivoa

I would be happy still with games that run at 720p60 and having other hardware power going into more complex systems and gameplay mechanics. Is this just me?

I think you've created a choice where none exists based on a false assumption about how performance can be divided up.

You can certainly throw some tasks onto the GPUs (we call them compute tasks and as of this recent generation of GPUs, you can efficiently schedule both rendering and compute tasks at the same time and not get bogged down ensuring that doesn't just lead to an underutilised GPU) and the current consoles have to due to their tablet-scale CPU cores (even with 8 of them, the low clock and small scale means they're not equivalent to desktop CPUs) - this is a necessity that's not unlike the PS3, which had the vector units (SPEs) to offload some tasks from the general purpose CPU. It is not strictly untrue that pushing rendering performance does restrict the other work you can be doing (both as it eats up all GPU resources and can leave the CPU cores spending a significant time pushing those instructions to the GPU each frame). But this weighting of resources operates for all elements of a game, why not give up better physics to make space for the extra systems?

However, in broader terms this like asking if we would be happier if Pixar movies looked much worse but had better stories. Yes, there is obviously a budget involved so spending less on rendering and developing cutting edge rendering techniques for new movies would provide more potential funding for the narrative team but also that's not really something that's actually a choice being made. The team working on the story aren't competing with the CG team but are working together to make a singular work that uses the expertise from both teams.

Simply dropping the resolution, without also firing half the art team and reducing the detail of thew worlds, would not save much (it would save literally no pennies in dev costs and less that you'd think in perf numbers for the GPU - so there would be no extra money for writing new GPU code to make use of any perf space for compute work). Going back to less detailed worlds and so on is possible but could still be done at 1080p30 or 1080p60 without many issues. So focusing on the resolution change is not really where I'd frame the question even if I was going to put this as a competitive rather than a cooperative process of creation (the greater detail in the world for ground foliage generates the stealth mechanics in Uncharted 4 or Assassin's Creed - they work together, not opposing each other).

Most mechanics and systems you see working are the result of one thing: investment in gameplay designers and/or programmers who sketch out (even making systems purely in paper first in some cases) and implement systems, see how they operate with the other systems already in the project, and ensure the code that implements them are not bottlenecking the engine. Wanting more investment in this is normal but also not something you can get to just by demanding the game's resolution be dropped. That's not really how any of this works.

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FacelessVixen

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My rule of thumb is to not play games below a display's native resolution, so 720 is fine on a 720 display, 1080 on 1080, yadda yadda yadda, repeating my opinion yet again.

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EgonVonHolz

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I have played about 60 hours of warframe at 1366×768 and sub 30 fps so yeah, I think 720p at 60 fps is totally fine.

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isomeri

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Depends on the size of your screen and how close you're sitting to it I guess. Movies and games can look really great on my 13" 720p laptop screen, but not so much on a 32" 720p set my friend has.

I do find it funny how just a couple of years ago 1080p was the gold standard that developers and consumers strived for, and now it's become sort of a bare minimum with the onslaught of 1440p and 4K monitors.

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MVHVTMV

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I think 720 is a bit low, but the most important issue for me is matching the display's native resolution. 720p looks fine on a 720p display, but it looks pretty terrible on a 1080p display. For personal preference I'd probably take a native 720p display over something like 900p running on a 1080p monitor, just because text and UI looks so much clearer at native.

As someone who's had no GPU for a few months, and is currently waiting on a GTX1070 in the mail from amazon though, I'm no stranger to playing games in 720/sub30, and oh boy. It's not a good time.

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TSTypeR

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It's really about expectation, I have a 720 display because of space constraints and it is fine. Whenever I went back to a 1080p display, I can notice the difference but I'm still satisfied with my 720, more is always better but better might not be necessary.

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IndeedCodyBrown

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I have a 720p 32 inch Samsung tv that I play all my games on, from NES all the way up to PS4 and I'm happy with it. If I go any bigger I will definitely get a 1080p set, but 4k seems entirely pointless. OLED is the only thing that is sort of a draw but not for the price.

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Dayve86

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#25  Edited By Dayve86

I would prefer 720p/60 to 1080p/30. But 1080p/60 is definitely preferred on my TV. I always prefer frame rate to resolution. My PC is still using a 1680x1050 monitor and it doesn't bother me at all (22inch). Obviously if money was no object I'd go bigger and high res but 4K is still years away for me, likely when OLED prices become reasonable because I'm still using and loving my Panasonic plasma and wouldn't replace it with an LCD unless it died.

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RonGalaxy

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#26  Edited By RonGalaxy

I'd say at this point 1080p 30fps is minimum for modern games, but I honestly don't care as long as the game makes up for it by being good. I try not to focus on this aspect of games, but rather how well designed it is.

Shadow of the Colossus running at 480p sub-30fps is still an amazing game. Duke Nukem: Forever running at 8k resolution and 120fps is still a piece of shit.

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daiphyer

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I feel like we're in that resolution-obsession period again, back from when the new consoles launched, and then before that, when Halo ran at like 560p or something on the 360.

There is always gonna be people who want every last pixel they can get, I am a video/photographer and I am like that with cameras, I get it, however, when it comes to gaming, frame-rate is way more important to me. I couldn't play L.A. Noire recently when I tried to get through it again because it is locked to 30. 60fps is a must for me, even if I have to turn down lighting effects or AA.

I started playing The Saboteur on PC again (love that game), and that game has a glitch where in any 1920-x resolution, the map starts glitching out. It has to be 12xx- something resolution for the map to work. And it's fiiiiiiiiine. The resolution isn't really the problem for me with older games, it's really the smudgy textures.

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cikame

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As far as PC games go 1080 is native to my monitor so 720 would look far too blurry, when it comes to console games the developer can optimize and get the most out of a lower resolution via post processing like console specific anti aliasing and other tricks, also TV's are usually further away which helps.
I'm totally fine playing console games at lower resolutions, Halo 3 looked fine at 1152×640 but that wouldn't fly on a PC monitor.

Also, if i may pick at something, "I feel weird because recent talk of resolution and framerate seems a bit unnecessary to me. I would be happy still with games that run at 720 60".
So it is necessary to you? It sounds like you would prefer lower resolutions if the frame rate was higher, and since developers are now targeting higher and higher resolutions frame rates will take the hit, this piques my interest because i spent an hour at work yesterday arguing the benefits of higher frame rate with someone, so to see someone who would take a graphics hit for more frames is interesting.

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avantegardener

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The sweet spot is actually around 2560×1440, 60fps ideally, but for me 30fps at that rez is acceptable.

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paulmako

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Whatever resolution the 3DS runs at is good enough.

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gundogan

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@mike said:
@mambogator said:

With frame rate, it's easy to see the difference between 30 and 60 FPS, but your brain can't differentiate between anything much higher than that.

As someone who owns a 144hz display, I can tell you that is not the case at all. Once you sit down in front of one you'll know and appreciate the difference, it is significant. In my experience the people who say things like the brain can't tell the difference much higher than 60 FPS don't own a high refresh rate monitor and have probably never even used one.

Yup. Even in Windows the difference between 60Hz and 144Hz in really big and suddenly things like 500Mhz vs 1000Mhz mouse polling rate becomes noticable too. It might be less noticable in games, but the experience is still smoother overal. So 144 fps or go home (and that's not going into that certain engines 'run' better at higher framerates, regardless of monitor refreshrate). :)

Although it really depends on the game. Higher framerate is always better, but some games (mostly singleplayer) play fine at 30fps so dropping to a lower resolution for more frames is not great then.

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Y2Ken

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I will take 720p60 or 1080p30 if that's what you got. I would prefer 1080p60 and you just turned the textures down a touch, honestly. I wish more games gave you the option to do this.

I really would love it if console games offered a couple of presets - "Hey run this at max visuals whatever" or "Turn it down a touch for a steady 30" or "Do what you gotta to get this at 60." Just a simple low/medium/high would be great (or even just a low/high switch). Heck, Battle Arena Toshinden 3 could do it, why can't you?

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FloppySnake

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#33  Edited By FloppySnake

They should start focussing on getting games running at 1080/60fps before mucking about with upscaling 1080 to 4k.

Though I guess 4k resolutions sound more glamorous to the regular crowd than a few extra frames.

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bluemorning104

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On PC, I run a 1366x768 monitor and have a TV hooked up for movies/shows/anything else I wanna show on there that's not games. While I'd like a nicer monitor in general, I don't feel a real need for 1080p, and the closest thing I'll be getting to a monitor anytime soon is a Vive.

That being said, if a console game doesn't do 1080 60, it's very noticeable, and very disappointing.

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TobbRobb

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I still tend to default with 720p60 for bandwidth reasons. Losing the option would be a bummer. But otherwise yeah, 720 doesn't look so hot anymore, and hasn't for a while. 1080p60 is what I want usually at this point.

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alexl86

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I just bought a 4K monitor for my PC, but I'm running most games at 1440p60 until I get my hands on a new GPU. For consoles, it's nice when the game can handle 1080p60, but that's not always the case.

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OurSin_360

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#37  Edited By OurSin_360

I used to play pc games at 720p 30-45fps, i would say i could go back to 720p before going back to those frame rates. I think (well depending on your tv/monitor) upscaling 720p will likely not look great but if you have a native 720 display it's honestly not that bad at all. Biggest issue will be the aliasing, but anti aliasing (imo) seems to do a lot more for lower resolutions than higher so that could be fixable.

@bluemorning104 I actually used the same resolution tv for about 3 years for pc gaming and early ps4, and it looked fine. I think the big difference for a lot of people is that for the best picture your native resolution is usually better, so upscaling something like that to 1080p or 4k/1440p is probably not going to look so hot depending on your displays scaling .

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MOAB

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It shouldn't bother you if you're satisfied with 720. I play games at 1440/144 and care too much about fps to ever go 4k.

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csl316

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My TV is 10 years old so I play at 720. And I feel fine with it.

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teekomeeko

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#40  Edited By teekomeeko

I'm extremely confused by what the OP means by "having other hardware power going into more complex systems and gameplay mechanics." Meh, doesn't matter I guess.

Anyway, my answer is 1080/60 because that's what my monitor's resolution is and on PC even the bare minimum new generation card, a GTX 1060 3GB at $200, will run games at that resolution, with a mix of high / ultra settings, and stable than a mother effer. Forced 30fps is fine as long as it's stable.

Additionally, as someone that pretends to be an artist, I kind of actually literally need at least 1440p and a second monitor at 1600x900 or higher to work with. 4K is a bit much to me because I can't afford anything that would run games at that (if anything out now can do so without trouble...), but I turned the Witcher 3 to that resolution and ultra settings on my TV just once, and holy sh*t. It was a mesmerizing, 10-20 frames per second, unplayable painting.

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sqrabbit

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I play games on PC at 1680 x 1050 (1050p?) and that's been fine for a while now. I keep thinking about upgrading the monitor but the refresh rates/gsync/ips/oled/hdr options keep me from buying one. I keep hoping standards will normalize some before I punch the ticket to move over to 1080p+.

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Darth_Navster

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I'm definitely a framerate over resolution guy, so as long as it can be a locked 60 fps (or locked 30 fps for some games) then I'm good. 720p is fine, but I do prefer 1080p if the developer can hit it.

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Sayishere

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720p looks realy blurry, ive been spoilt with my 1440p monitor 144hz, i can never go back now.

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Quarters

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#44  Edited By Quarters

Considering 720/30 doesn't even bother me, certainly.

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ChrisTaran

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Resolution is king! I can handle a framerate in the low 20's no problem.

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Nasar7

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I don't care about 60 fps, would much rather have the increased resolution. If you mostly play competitive online and/or e-sports games, sure, I can see why it matters to you but people who say 30fps is unplayable garbage deserve to be shipped into the sun.

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Tom_omb

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#47  Edited By Tom_omb

My TV is still 720, so it's hard to complain about resolution, maybe that'll change when I upgrade. Framerate I never think about unless there's a blatantly noticeable hitch in performance. Like when I'm lagging really hard in WoW or when too many N-bombs have been tossed in Perfect Dark. Old examples, I know, but that's how often framerate is an issue for me.

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geirr

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#48  Edited By geirr

4K or bust!

Though seriously I'm sure we'd all be able to live with any resolution/frame rate if it meant it was the only way we could play games.

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Joe423

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#49  Edited By Joe423

1080p should be the bare minimum now. It should have been the minimum when they launched the PS4 and Xbox One but for one reason or another that didn't happen.

I love 60fps and I play all my PC games at 60fps but it's a pipe-dream to expect that to be standard on consoles now.