Ubisoft Engineer Supposedly Suggests 30fps Parity Is Set By Console Manufacturers

In recent times we've been seeing a lot of PC games hit with console-style parity for some pretty ridiculous things. For instance, one of the common trends we've been seeing a lot of lately is a 30 frames per second hard-lock on PC ports, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Well, a Ubisoft engineer supposedly spilled some beans on why that is.

Guru3D spotted a Reddit post on the Glorious PC Master Race thread where a student asked members if they had any questions that he could relay to some Ubisoft engineers who would be speaking and answering questions at the school.

Three reps from Ubisoft were on hand, one of which was Ubisoft's junior software architect Nicolas Demay, as you can see in the picture above.

Some of the questions asked were all straight to the point and common sense. According to the Guru3D post, someone asked the Ubisoft engineers about the 30fps versus the 60fps issue, in which the student stated...

“The Game Architect said that they aim for 60 fps but due to "limitations", they have to settle for 30 fps in recent games. He then implied that console makers are pressuring them into doing the same thing on PC.”

If you think that sounds ridiculous, just look no further than vigilante engineers having to mod games to get them to run at the proper resolution and frame-rates, with recent titles requiring users to manually unlock 60fps such as The Evil Within, Dead Rising 3, Need for Speed Rivals and Dark Souls just to rattle off a few offenders.

The student also stated that he asked the engineer about the negative feedback from the community surrounding the 30fps hard-lock on some games, stating...

"'Are you aware of the negative response to the recent decision to lock your games (like AC:Unity) into 30 frames per second? If so, what do you think about that?'" [..]“I asked this question at the end of the presentation, everyone laughed. The Game Architect said that on consoles, and for this type of game, they have to chose between graphical fidelity and smoothness. He implied that MS is making them lock the framerate on PC too. Then, he smiled, said "But our eyes can't see past 24 fps anyway" and winked at me.”

Doesn't sound surprising in the least.

In fact, there's been a lot of uproar over supposed forced parity between resolutions on the PS4 and Xbox One, something that came to a head when Ubisoft rolled out one excuse after another for Assassin's Creed Unity's 900p standard on both Xbox One and PS4.

There are plenty of other interesting tidbits from the Guru3D article worth checking out, including that a lot of the standardized performance specs will be in result to the low technical ceilings from the Xbox One and PS4, but more-so the former over the latter.

One of the things I'm curious about is how this will affect purchasing decisions down the road as word-of-mouth continues to spread about certain industry politics gimping games in order to maintain an equal level playing-field on the performance front? It's also interesting that Nintendo doesn't really seem to get involved in that sort of stuff.