"I wish gamers understood what 60fps means" Rocksteady developer defends Gotham Knights 30fps experience on PS5

WB Games Montreal’s upcoming superhero action-adventure title, Gotham Knights, is right around the corner, with fans of the Arkhamverse and Batman games in general excited to finally get a game with the iconic Bat Family characters Batgirl, Robin, Red Hood, and Nightwing as the primary protagonists.

However, it seems the game has already caught players for locking the performance of the current-generation exclusive title to 30fps with no option for a higher framerate cap, something that has been the norm for most AAA current-generation console ports.

Since reports of the game being locked to 30fps on PlayStation 5 surfaced online, it has come under some criticism from players.

Recently, a developer from Rocksteady, the studio behind the iconic Batman Arkham games, took to Twitter to express their views on why Gotham Knights being locked to 30fps makes sense, and players demanding the 60fps mode might need to wait for post-launch updates for that to be made possible.

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Gotham Knights being locked to 30fps without any options to toggle between performance and fidelity mode has players baffled

Gotham Knights features some really expensive graphical features such as ray-traced shadows, reflections, and an improved lighting engine that is very heavy on GPU bandwidth, which is very much evident by the game's pretty hefty system requirements on PC, asking for a GTX 1660ti as the minimum GPU requirement.

While GTX 1660ti is a few years old at this point, it is still a powerful mid-range card.

According to Lee Devonald, the ray-traced visuals, 4K resolution target, and the massive open-world, with numerous NPCs inhabiting it, all culminate towards taxing the current-generation console hardware to such a degree that rendering the assets at 60 frames per second becomes borderline impossible, thus a 30fps target becomes mandatory to deliver a smooth gameplay experience.

Devonald also emphasized on how much developers need to scale back a game's visuals and other aspects to deliver a smooth 60fps experience. Rendering every frame of a game with the visual clarity and graphical splendor that players have come to expect from most AAA games on current-generation consoles comes at a massive cost to performance, especially on consoles.

Gotham Knights being locked to 30fps, for the most part, makes sense given the game's visual fidelity, resolution target, and ray-tracing capabilities on current-generation consoles.

However, there are games out there that, despite featuring all the similar elements still manage to run at a stable 60fps on both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.

Games like Horizon Forbidden West, Cyberpunk 2077, Ghostwire: Tokyo, and the likes are all similar open-world games, despite featuring all the modern graphical features and improvements, are still able to deliver a smooth 60fps experience on current-generation consoles.

It remains to be seen if WB Games Montreal will eventually end up adding a 60fps performance mode to Gotham Knights in the future, but it is not something players should expect from the game when it launches on October 21, 2022, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows PC.