​Do You Care About Resolution And Frame Rate In Games?

Lately the internet has mustered a plethora of opinions on whether anyone should care about the finer technical details of a game. How much does screen resolution really matter? Is frame rate the end-all be-all?

Some of us at Kotaku have already made our opinions on the matter known—but I thought I'd ask you what you think. How much do you care about resolution and frame rate?

First up: Resolution. Resolution refers to the number of pixels a game fits on screen. These days, most discussion of resolution centers around whether a game runs at the full 1920x1080 (1080p) that most HDTVs are capable of or somewhere below that, usually at 900p or 720p. Though some PC gamers blow resolutions up much higher, if they have monitors or 4K TVs that can support it.


Second up: Frame rate. A game's frame rate is a measure of the speed at which the image is refreshed on screen. Lately, the discussion of frame rate has centered around the difference between games that run at 60 frames per second (very smooth, generally considered a target for PC games and some console games like Call of Duty) and 30fps (where most last-gen console games run, closer to the 24fps frame rate of most movies and TV shows).