Xbox Boss Still Says Frame Rate Is More Important Than Resolution

[Andrew]

Phil Spencer is nothing if not consistent. For years the Xbox boss has talked about his preference for frame-rate over resolution, and Spencer sticks by this even at the dawn of a new console generation with the Xbox Series X.

“The feel of the games [is] definitely something that we wanted to have more focus on, not just throwing more pixels on screen,” said Spencer in a new interview with Stevivor. These comments echo the ones he’s made in the past, as far back as 2014.

...

In the current and previous console generations (not including PC) the hardware is limited, so developers may have had to prioritize frame rate over resolution, or vice versa, though according to a report by Polygon the two aren’t directly proportional. Developers can increase the resolution to a point without affecting frame-rate. But that becomes less doable the more games ventures into the next-gen territory.

 

Source

 

Too bad the developers don't agree. The only games I can really think of that are 60fps on the Xbox One are first party games.

[ENTERPRISE]

I do not think you can prioritize one over the other unless you are hitting some form of performance bottleneck. It has always been a balancing act, people want the higher resolutions for sure, but obviously the higher res is no good if you are sub 30FPS. Hopefully with the next gen we can get better scaling than the previous gen, but only time will tell.

[Andrew]

Yeah, graphics have always sold better than frame rate as it's much easier to show better graphics than better frame rate. So I do understand why a lot of developers would prefer 30fps with better visuals than 60fps with slightly worse visuals.

[ENTERPRISE]

A huge factor in all this will be how well the new hardware scales. In this day and age and looking at the new specs of the next gen (assuming proper development) I do not think it is unrealistic to start hitting those higher resolutions at 60FPS.