Need For Speed Rivals Is Gimped On PC, 60fps Completely Breaks The Game

The next-gen of gaming on home consoles was supposed to help PC gaming. Remember that faux-axiom from Stockholm Syndrome consolites saying “But, but, but, next-gen consoles help PC game development!”? Well, I'm not even going to say anything. Just watch the video above.

So what did you just watch? What is that?

The minute-long video from PC Master Race Argentina is just a small piece of a much larger and less complicated puzzle... in fact, it's more like a paint-by-numbers canvas of incompetence.

The physics for the game is completely broken when running at anything beyond 30 frames per second.

The PC version of Need for Speed: Rivals is hard-locked to 30 frames per second and you have to tamper with some settings outside of the game to access 60 frames per second. Why? Because it's ported from the home consoles where the game is hard-locked to 30 frames per second. Why? Well, because the Xbox One and PS4 are trying to hit the Holy Grail of console gaming resolution at 1080p and in order to maintain performance fidelity at that resolution, the developers, Ghost, had to hard code the frame rate to the game's operating clock cycle. Why? Because if the game starts dropping frames due to on-screen activity, it's still going to output at 30 frames per second without slow down. In a way, it's a shortcut to ensure that Need for Speed: Rivals, running on the Frostbite 3 engine from DICE, doesn't fall victim to the same issues that Dead Rising 3 did on the Xbox One, where the game would average 20fps during the majority of the combat and driving sequences.

I don't know if dropping frames to maintain performance is better or worse than frame stutter and slowdown. Some of you might be wondering why they would even include this feature in the game's core design, and it's likely to due with the asynchronous multiplayer component, where people can drop in and out of the game seamlessly. Force-feeding a hard-lock of 30fps theoretically ensures that players won't have to worry about performance affecting multiplayer races. For console gaming it's not a bad concept... but for PC gaming it's an utterly reprehensible tactic.

While many gamers could be forgiving of L.A. Noire being hard-locked on PC due to the higher frame rate causing issues with the facial animations, the problem here is that a lot of PC gamers are used to playing without frame limiters and enjoying the pleasures of 60 uninhibited frames per second. There's also no reason why NFS: Rivals should have been hard-locked on PC in the first place.

As outlined in a video by TotalBiscuit, the PC port of Need for Speed: Rivals isn't just littered with remnants of consolitis, but it's a piss-poor port where you can max the game out at 100fps using commands outside of the provided options menu to completely break the game. Check it out below.

Anyone who continues to spread the misinformed propaganda of not being able to see the difference between 30fps and 60fps really needs to stop smoking FUD... the least you could do is upgrade to crack or something; it'll cut down on the nonsense it feeds to your brain that comes out of your mouth and fingertips.

Even ignoring the cringe-worthy tutorials made for five-year-olds suffering from degenerative brain damage (though that would technically be an insult to the five-year-old), the game's hard-locked 30fps setting is baffling insofar that the AI appears to also be hard-locked to a 30fps cycle in the game's core operations. In other words, when the 60fps speeds everything up, the AI doesn't speed up because its calculations appear to be locked on a cycle where it always runs as if it assumes the runtime environment is 30 frames per second. It's almost laughable. No, scratch that... it is laughable.

Much like Call of Duty: Ghosts for PC, you'll probably want to avoid picking up a copy of Need for Speed: Rivals until a patch is issued to fix the game. “Next-gen gaming will help PC” my foot.