What do the PS4 and most German cinemas have in common? They all only achieve 60 FPS. This will now also become a curse for cinemas after the PS4.
What is the problem? Since October 3, 2019, Ang Lee’s film “Gemini Man” starring Will Smith has been showing in cinemas. The film was shot in 120 FPS, but you can hardly see it anywhere.
The reason is that most German cinemas cannot play movies with such a frame rate at all. The cinemas are struggling with the same problem that the Playstation 4 has.
Cinema and PS4: Too few FPS for new technology
This is why the PS4 cannot achieve more than 60 FPS: The team at Oxide Games explains in an interview with GamingBolt the problem of the consoles as follows:
“If you have 720p at 30 FPS and want to double both the pixels and the frame rate [to 1080p], it requires four times as much power.”
Four times as much power because you want to double both the frame rate and the pixel density (so 2+2). And this is where the problem of the Playstation 4 and also the Xbox One lies.
Full HD or 4K is not a problem for the PS4 Pro, but it often cannot render the game at 60 FPS. The PS4 Pro therefore renders many games in 4K resolution only at 30 FPS to keep performance consistent. In doing so, the console upscales and does not achieve a native 4K resolution.
This much power does the Playstation 4 offer: The performance of the Playstation 4 Pro increases only slightly to just over double: The Playstation 4 reaches 1843 GFLOPS, while the Playstation 4 Pro achieves 4200 GFLOPS.
GFLOPS stands for “Giga Floating Point Operations Per Second” in English. The number indicates how many additions or multiplications the processor of the PC or console can perform per second. One GFLOP is 109 calculations that the processor can handle per second. GFLOPs describe the performance of the processor.
For a native 4K resolution with 60 FPS, the performance of the Playstation 4 Pro would have needed to quadruple instead of double!
Playstation 4: Either high resolution or high FPS
How do PS4 games handle this? In Borderlands 3, for example, players can choose between 4K resolution and Full HD resolution:
- If the choice falls on the higher resolution, then the console renders the game in 4K at 30 FPS on the screen.
- If players choose the 1080p resolution, the console delivers 60 FPS.
Scott Velasquez, Online & Social Product Owner of Borderlands 3, also explains in an interview with the PlayStation Blog:
If you prefer resolution on a screen that only supports 1080p, the game upscales it using the console hardware to a higher resolution.
This mainly offers the advantage of achieving a sharper image at a 1080p resolution, at the cost of the FPS rate.
The Playstation 4 will soon have a successor. Everything we know about the Playstation 5 can be found in our comprehensive preview:
Other games like Anthem even cap at 30 FPS – no matter which resolution is used. The developers cite graphics as the reason, which is more important to them:
Already 60 FPS are rare in the cinema
This is why 24 FPS are common in cinemas: In cinemas, the standard format for films is 24 frames per second, short 24p. This is a compromise made by filmmakers: films should not flicker or exceed film material costs.
With the emergence of sound films, 24 FPS then also represented the official speed, so that the sound does not run faster or slower than the film.
This is why cinemas cannot show the film: Almost all digital cinema cameras that can also show 3D films today operate at a frame rate of 60 FPS. Most filmmakers use the same or a very similar technique.
The film Gemini Man was mainly shot in HFR 120 FPS.
HFR stands for High Frame Rate, which means high frame rate. A high frame rate means that a movie is shown particularly quickly. The normal cinema standard is 24 FPS. HFR indicates that, for example, Gemini Man already runs significantly faster at 60 FPS than an ordinary film in the cinema.
In contrast to the normal 24 frames per second, a film in 60 FPS offers two and a half times the information for the human eye. Thus, action scenes, for example, appear much smoother, almost like in a first-person shooter. But the film also appears artificial because of this – with 3D films, this is often intentional.
120 FPS provides even five times more information than the usual 24p cinema material.
However, Gemini Man is not the first film shot in HFR. Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy was also shot at a higher frame rate, specifically at 48 frames. This was not a problem for cinemas, but Gemini Man with more than 60 FPS surpasses the limits.
Better than the Playstation 4 is only Munich
This is what Munich can do: If you live in Munich, you can watch Gemini Man in 120 FPS: Only the Mathäser Filmpalast in Munich has the necessary technology to show the film in 120 FPS.
The Playstation 4 will soon have a successor. Everything we know about the Playstation 5 can be found in our comprehensive preview:
