I spent a lot of money on my TV. At the time that I bought it, the LG C2 was considered to be one the most advanced OLED displays in the world. I remember how excited I was to get it home and set it up. The first thing I did when I got it out of the box was load up Spider-Man: Miles Morales on PS5. It had recently received a new Performance RT option that added rayꦯ tracing to the 4k/60fps mode. I was dumbfounded by how incredibly smooth and vibrant the image was. Swinging through New York at 60fps on such a beautiful display was practically a religious experience for me. I spent the rest🀅 of the week blissfully watching 4K Blu-rays with my partner, and even years later, I still often find myself mystified by this OLED. In contrast, it took a week for my partner to even realize it was a different TV.
It is incredibly frustrating to me that she can’t tell the difference between a busted up 1080p Westinghouse TV I’ve had since college and a top-of-the-line 4K OLED. I ꦉwish she could app🃏reciate the fidelity like I do. The deep, inky blacks, the incredible dynamic range, and the fluid 120Hz refresh rate - but she can’t. Unless you put two images side by side, she just isn’t able to identify what makes a high-performance display like the C2 so good. Even then, a lot of the nuances would be lost.
There’s an eternal debate about the importance of technical specs in games. Every time an upcoming triple-A game reveals their graphics options, there’s always a group of people moaning about them, and another group of people moaning about them moaning. The discourse reignited this week when Bethesda revealed that Redfall will not support 60fps on Xbox at launch. People that care about that sort of thing are upset, and people that don’t care think the people that do care are overreacting. Everyone seems to have a need to state their position on frame rates as if it's a matter of opinion, but the reality is that whether you can tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps or not, you’re right.
I’m going to oversimplify some complicated neuroscience here for the sake of brevity, but there are biological and conditional factors that g🎃o into whether or not someone is sensitive to high-frame rates. Many are born with the visual acuity to recognize different frame rates, but many more of us have simply conditioned ourselves by the games we play. Anyone with a lot of experience in competitive first-person shooters, where higher frame rates allow you to see and react to opponents faster, can recognize 30fps game play in an instant. If you’ve only ever played Stardew Valley on your Switch, your brain isn’t trained the same way.
As a Counter-Strike kid that grew up into an Overwatch and Apex Legends fiend, I have been playing games on the highest frame rat൲e possible my entire life. I can recognize anything below 80fps, and anything below 50fps is uncomfortable to look at. For any kind of fast-moving action game - especially a shooter like Redfall - I would not be able to play at 30fps. It would give me a headache and make me nauseous within minutes.
That’s true for me, but it isn’t true for everyone. If you can comfortably play Redfall at 30fps and enjoy it, you’ll get no judgment from me. I don’t think you're unsophisticated or less of a gamer, and I certainly don’t think you’re pretending not to see the difference. Myself, and people that have trained their eyes on high-frame rate games, can see the difference, and are affected by it differently than you.
The Redfall criticism is fair. 60fps is an industry standard for triple-A games in the current console generation, and it’s unacceptable that a first-party Microsoft game is launching without it. I’m not just being stuck up when I say I can’t play a game like that at 30fps. I’m lucky I have a powerful PC, because if I was an Xbox player, I’d have to wait to play Redfall until Arkane could get its act together. It’s an accessibilitℱy issue for me, and announcing you don’t need 60fps to enjoy the game is like a🐽nnouncing you don’t need color-blind mode. You might not care, but the people that need it do. It’s time to stop having this debate. If frame rates matter to you then they matter to you, and if they don’t, they don’t.