Look, There's A Lot To Be Said About The Contemporary Gaming Industry's Preoccupation With Graphics Performance

Look, there's a lot to be said about the contemporary gaming industry's preoccupation with graphics performance in contemporary video games, but "no video game needs to run at higher than thirty frames per second" – which is something I've seen come up in a couple of recent trending posts – isn't a terribly supportable assertion.

The notion that sixty frames per second ought to be a baseline performance target isn't a modern one. Most NES games ran at sixty frames per second. This was in 1983 – we're talking about a system with two kilobytes of RAM, and even then, sixty frames per second was considered the gold standard. There's a good reason for that, too: if you go much lower, rapidly moving backgrounds start to give a lot of folks eye strain and vertigo. It's genuinely an accessibility problem.

The idea that thirty frames per second is acceptable didn't gain currency until first-generation 3D consoles like the N64, as a compromise to allow more complex character models and environments within the limited capabilities of early 3D GPUs. If you're characterising the 60fps standard as the product of studios pushing shiny graphics over good technical design, historically speaking you've got it precisely backwards: it's actually the 30fps standard that's the product of prioritising flash and spectacle over user experience.