Frame-rate and resolution discourse is "getting a bit out of hand", says Alan Wake 2 dev

rockpapershotgun.com:

In the nicest possible way, and with the greatest of respect, Remedy's comms director Thomas Puha would like people to stop fixating on frame-rate and resolution and get on with their bloody lives. Or at least, that's my summary of his thoughts following the recent announcement on Xitter that Alan Wake 2 will have a performance mode on PS5 and Xbox Series X, allowing consoleers for whom responsiveness is a priority to eke a higher frame-rate out of a game "built from the beginning as a 30fps experience focusing on visuals and ambiance."

Puha has subsequently been chatting to press about the creation of the mode and Alan Wake 2's visuals at large. In what has become a time-honoured ceremony for any AAA game developer a month or two before release, he took a moment to observe that focussing on frame-rate vs resolution is missing the wood for the trees. (The trees in question do take a toll on Alan Wake 2's performance, but we'll get to that further down the page.)

Puha avoided giving figures for the game's performance mode FPS and resolution in his announcement Xpost - it'll "mostly" function at 60 frames a second - because he knew it would spark a fresh round of discourse. "When I tweeted about this I didn't tweet the resolution, because people look at the numbers and say, oh that's bad," he told IGN in a tech chat that is worth a watch, even if you're playing on PC. "I'm like, you should look at the image quality of this game."

There's obviously much more to videogame performance than the ratio between frame-rate and resolution. "That's not the thing that just like, magically makes it run somewhere close to 60," Puha said of lowering the resolution, adding that Alan Wake 2 makes use of "a lot of tricks" to increase