Doesn’t it mostly require different skill? Better, more detailed art requires skill at making that art. Unless you’re doing it by chucking stuff out until you get there, hitting 60fps requires knowledge and experience across the board about how to get the most out of your target hardware, and all of the tools and layers between you and it.
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My brother and I were pumped if we can get 20fps in 320*240 back when were using Riva TNT2.
Now I won’t play Dishonored 2 because I can only get it to 45fps with the demo.
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It’s all skill, absolutely. 30fps or 60fps. It’s my (personal) experience that finding people who are skilled at creating high quality/high detail/high poly art assets that can work in a game costs a lot more than finding low poly art assets. It takes additional skill as a programmer to integrate those assets and maintain at least 30fps. It’s one thing to incorporate low poly models and hone your code to work at 60fps with them. It’s another thing entirely to know where and how to incorporate high detail art along with low detail art to achieve what appears to be fully high detail, and still hold steady at at least 30fps.
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Why is this either/or…I only accept 60fps and highest graphics quality. 
I mean, VR and 144Hz monitors are things now, 60fps is not really that much.
–Eric
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Its not so much programming though, more so clever material management. For example our core domain adds zero garbage and under 0.5ms overhead if 12 players on the server, almost zero overhead if you are alone on server. But set pass calls, batching etc, etc is where our problems are
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Highly depends on genre etc
But with that said, I generally prefer 60fps (or higher!). On the other hand, whenever I play a 30fps game I quickly get over it and don’t mind the lower framerate.
But it’d better look great. I am much more forgiving of bad graphics at +60fps than at 30fps. So if you’re going to limit it it’d better look great.
(also I find Unity 30fps to be jittery… 60fps too, but less noticeable)
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Enduro Racer was perceived as a fast racer game for the time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XgP7Pc_EMw
"…Enduro Racer was a fantastic achievement on a humble 8-bit computer. It was fast, smooth with well drawn graphics & even had undulating tracks. " (from RetroGamer.net)
So I guess performance and/or quality are always relative to some other similar title of the moment.
Note: notice the LOD technique on the border rocks 
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Probably there is still some spikes in the frame rate, we have them since the old age of Unity.
I don’t pay much attention to it anymore, but I guess it is still there.
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That’s not constant 60fps vs constant 30fps.
This is 60fps vs laggy 30fps. 30 fps doesn’t look that bad,there were many obvious spikes in framerate there.
In a real 60vs30 scenario, you would notice the difference only on really fast movement.
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Do you have any examples? I recall seeing this little animation of a UFO moving against a moving background of starts that had 30, 60, and 120. Even there it was abundantly clear.
I strongly disagree that one wouldn’t notice in a normal situation. I’ve played plenty of games at 60, plenty locked at thirty. 99% of the time it’s obvious.
Edit: https://www.testufo.com/
Even if you slow the speed to 120 pixels per second, 30 fps looks awful.
Though if you have comparisons of normal gameplay with good frame-pacing I’d love to see it.
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This seem a better comparison:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvXuTwtmXOs
If you compare the two you may see the difference, but if you focus on one side you wouldn’t notice much.
But then again this is me, you may have a different perception.
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In most cases it’s still very obvious to me. Most obvious is probably the ATV driving, as well as that medieval fantasy looking demo near the end.
However if we’re going to talk about frame pacing and such we should probably have actual data, actual frametimes.
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Basically, my original point is that (in my personal experience) it takes more time, money, and skill to create a solid 30fps game with 4x graphics quality than it does to create a solid 60fps game without the additional 4x graphics quality. Regardless of whether it’s on the programming side or the art side, any time you have an increase in graphics quality, you are going to increase the time it takes to create that game.
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Regarding FPS and the stutter issue: what if Unity game loop plays at 30 FPS on mobile and let iOS player handle the image interpolation as an option (as most UHD TVs offer today)? Would that save battery?
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well the interpolation is performed by the processor, you aren’t saving anything if there is anything that is processed at all.
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If the players get 60 FPS, they complain the reflections aren’t realtime.
If they get realtime reflections, they complain they are not getting 60 FPS.
There is no winning.
Personally, I don’t care if game runs at 60 FPS, unless it is a fast driving game. Slower FPS can make me feel disoriented in these fast paced games as the brain is working extra hard to make sense of what is happening due to lower FPS. I enjoying taking things slow and observing all the detail (quality).
my vote: 30 FPS + all the bells and whistles.
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All things being equal, and if you consider a broad range of games, which will push you above other games? 30fps is perfectly acceptable in many if not most types of games. Will doubling the frame rate make your game more appealing and have the potential to engage (and monetize) more players than quadrupling the visual fidelity/quality? I would say not even close. Polish is often the main difference between top and bottom of the charts. Sure, there may some types of games where high fps might make a difference, but on average, visual quality will be more important to more games.
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No, it depends on how much processor time it takes. If interpolation takes less time than it would take to compute the frames “for real”, then it wins.
Do both. (Although, then the complaint is that it doesn’t get 60fps at 4K. )
Still is better at 60fps. I was playing Subnautica the other day, and for some reason it was running at 30fps instead of the usual 60, which was making things annoying even though it’s not a fast-paced game. (I quit and restart, which fixed it.) If you’re used to 60, 30 is kinda hard to take.
–Eric
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Of course the nice thing about it is if you’re releasing on something else AND PC, you can target 30 FPS and just leave it to PC players to get strong enough hardware to run the game faster. We’ll eventually be able to run the game at higher framerates. We won’t eventually be able to play with 4 times the quality you put in.
But don’t lock it at 30 (on PC), don’t ever do that.
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I don’t know why people are so strongly against this. At GCAP a few years ago someone said that their studio had tested consistent 30fps vs. a higher but unstable framerate with users, and users preferred the consistent 30fps.
I understand wanting the option to unlock it if your system can reliably run it faster, but I also understand the choice to lock it by default.
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