Why 60 frames per second should be the standard for next-gen

Until hyper-realistic techniques like ray-tracing become fully usable in real-time (almost certainly not going to happen in home consoles any time soon), why not use this coming generation to really consolidate what we have? Make excellence the norm and get people used to the best, ready for the true generational leap into the truly photo-real in a few more years? Ray-traced water effects like this NVIDIA tech demo are unlikely to be fully realised in next-gen consoles, so why chase them prematurely at the expense of gaming fluidity? There's plenty of time for them later.

He added: "I think twitch games, particularly those with a competitive element to them, would likely start to assume 60 as a base, but for open world type games that are trying to make massive, living worlds, I think there is still a place for 30 fps games that can portray realistic population density and environmental detail. Game development will always be a tradeoff of how to marshall limited hardware resources in order to achieve the best result for a particular game."

I'm up for that. Of course there's room for both, but I want to see next-gen games running below 60fps only because they really need to. I think we can all agree that arcades are dead because home gaming caught up. So it's about time things at home actually ran 'at arcade speeds' at last.

What do you think? Should next-gen games all run at 60fps? Or do you not even notice frame-rates? Let us know in the comments.

Justin Towell

Justin was a GamesRadar staffer for 10 years but is now a freelancer, musician and videographer. He's big on retro, Sega and racing games (especially retro Sega racing games) and currently also writes for Play Magazine, Traxion.gg, PC Gamer and TopTenReviews, as well as running his own YouTube channel. Having learned to love all platforms equally after Sega left the hardware industry (sniff), his favourite games include Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams, Zelda BotW, Sea of Thieves, Sega Rally Championship and Treasure Island Dizzy.