User blog comment:ExtremeGamer5665/MW3 takes jabs at Battlefield 3/@comment-70.30.55.73-20110702013633/@comment-72.64.96.198-20110704185043

I have a question that could maybe steer this discussion in a different way. It will take a bit for me to get there, but bear with me.

Obviously, a main argument is that 60 frames per second is smoother, which means that the video is higher quality. I suppose you could technically say that smoothness of a video is quality, sure. But logically, smoothness is more related to the efficiency of the engine, rather than how graphically superior it is. I'm sure I, with limited training in Flash, could put together a video that runs smoothly at 60 FPS and it would look awful. And that makes perfect sense. Something running at 60 FPS doesn't have to look as polished as it does at 30 FPS to look good.

What people should be looking for is polishing, rather than smoothness. Polish to me is virtually everything that EA and DICE included in the demo video of Frostbite 2. More realistic animations, phenomenal lighting, destructible environments, audio, and the like. For instance, one light sensor/beacon/mote/whatever DICE said it was that Frostbite 2 uses has more lighting information than any single level of BFBC2? I'd say that in under two years, that's a huge polish. I would have left out the destructible environments as it seems like it's more of an innovation of the Battlefield series just like dual wielding was for Halo, but the ability to have destroyed pieces of a building shear off additional pieces is just another instance of polishing.

I'm sure someone would comment about efficiency, so I'll go ahead and address that as well. There's really only two major reasons a game engine would be more efficient than another. 1.) The engine is better. 2.) Whatever the engine is rendering doesn't take much time to process due to any number of reasons (e.g. simplicity, lower resolution, etc.). The engine of BF3 has been developed for BF3 in particular, whereas the engine of CoD has been reworked and redesigned for several years now. Out of the two reasons above, what is more likely the reasoning for having 60 FPS? A better engine? Or one that can run it because of lower quality input? Video games have gotten loads better graphically since their genesis, and I personally would even take a 15-20 FPS game that looks photorealistic over a 60 FPS game that looks like it's part of an expansion pack to a game from two years earlier.

So that's my question. What would YOU prefer? Would you prefer something that looks phenomenal at a lower framerate, or a marginally polished recapitulation of something at a higher framerate?