1080p, 900p, 30fps, 60fps, 144hz. All of these different numbers and letters, what do they mean? You’ve certainly seen most if not all of them when it comes to describing a game’s graphical quality. However there seems to be a large amount of confusion around what is and isn’t best for games in 2014/2015, so I hope to shed some light on the situation for everyone, so that you can make calculated decisions on what you want to spend your hard earned money on, for the best experience possible.
Resolution
The resolution of a game is effectively how many pixels are shown on screen at any given time. Most (but not all!) TVs come standard at a 16:9 aspect ratio, this effectively gives us what we call today, widescreen; a screen that is wider than it is tall. As such the pixel count needs to accurately reflect the aspect ratio, so most games (again most, but not all!) use the 16:9 model for their resolutions, of which the most commonly known is 1080p. I won’t explain the difference between 1080p and 1080i, as interlacing is more of a TV attribute than a gaming factor, but bare in mind it will make a minor difference to video quality, but it has nothing to do with the game itself. 1080p means that the 16:9 resolution is 1920×1080, this means at any given time the screen will draw a whopping 2,073,600 pixels on screen! But what’s that mean for what you can actually see? Well, let’s imagine a 2×2 grid. 
If you try to draw a face, well, you can’t. There isn’t enough pixel space to draw a smiling face and have it legible. Move up to 10×10, now it’s possible, but it doesn’t look very good. If you keep going up, you can keep adding more quality, more effects and more detail in between pixels. However this obviously increases the work load of the hardware running the program, which is something to bare in mind, but we’ll talk about that later.
You may have heard the term “4K Ultra HD”, this is the next technological step in video quality. Whilst 1080p is 1920×1080, 4K UHD is a monstrous 3840×2160, which is a huge forward leap in the amount of quality that can be displayed. Hopefully games will be able to play at this level of resolution one day, but for now whenever you see a game’s resolution, effectively remember that bigger always means better, with very rare exceptions.
Frames Per Second (FPS)
FPS is how quickly the screen you are viewing updates to show the next frame of the display. This is arguably more important than resolution, as whilst you may be able to see a beautiful game in front of you, if it runs at sub-30 FPS, it’s going to look choppy and unresponsive. For some games, for example Telltale game’s The Walking Dead, this isn’t a huge issue, as the input of the player isn’t as intensive as a first person shooter game, but regardless, the FPS being low does cause a negative impact to the game. When designing a game, the more graphically intense it gets (For example, the higher the resolution is) then the more work that the graphics processor has to work to keep the FPS up. When the work is too much, it some times can dip down below what’s expected, and this is what’s commonly called screen lag, or just lag (though technically lag is an internet issue, both instances cause the same issues). When a game lags, it runs slower than expected, and the input from your controller or keyboard and mouse can become distorted. Imagine playing the game Dark Souls, a game made by From Software in which timing of your controls is crucial to succeeding at the game. If at any time the FPS drops down (Which is unfortunately does in Dark Souls), the timing of those specific actions will be delayed, or pressed to early due to muscle memory and habit. Obviously this causes a huge issue with how you play the game, and negatively effects your experience. Additionally, the higher the framerate, the more smooth animations and the overall feel of the game will run. For example, imagine a flag blowing in the wind. If it only updated once per second, it would slowly and choppily update along the flag until the 
end. If you boost it up to 60 frames, it will look fluid and realistic as it updates a lot quicker visually. But the big question is, 30FPS vs 60FPS. Many developers say that 30FPS is better for a more “cinematic” experience, and 60FPS is better for an action or fast paced game in which you need to have active input very frequently, and to some extent, they aren’t lying and it’s true. When designing a game, you need to decide on an artstyle. After that you need to decide exactly what level of graphical fidelity you need to use. If you want your game to look graphically impressive and the artstyle to be realistic and believable, it’s going to be very intensive. Trying to run a game like this at 60FPS is a hefty task that current consoles and even some PCs just aren’t capable of. As such you have to trade off, if you want your game to look excellent, maybe 30FPS is better for your game. But this, as explained earlier, makes it less responsive and fluid. On the other hand, you can tone down the graphics to a more reasonable level, which will make it look worse, but respond better. Ultimately it’s a flaw of processing power, and not a design decision. If technology would allow it, then it would be wonderful to have all games running at 120FPS and all looking as beautiful as possible. Unfortunately that’s not the case, and instead trade offs need to be made. To conclude on FPS, higher is generally better, but the higher the FPS, the less pretty developers can make the game, which is a huge deal for some gamers, myself included. As a small afternote on FPS, note that each monitor or TV has a refresh rate, measured in hertz or Hz. The monitor can only refresh as fast as the Hz, for example it’s common for monitors to come at 60Hz, which is perfect for playing at 60FPS. Should you try to play at 120FPS on a 60Hz monitor, you’ll experience something known as screen tear, where the game’s updating the screen faster than the monitor can keep up with, causing weird artifacting lines to appear across you game, which looks very disorientating. Once again this is a flaw with hardware, and not particularly something game developers have control over.
What does this all mean for graphics?
Ultimately it’s the gamer’s decision what he wants, but it’s a flaw of developers to try to push their fast-paced video games with intense graphics at 30FPS,which creates a gaming environment that feels forced and unresponsive. To these developers I plead with you, pick graphics or framerate, not both, because until technology advances further it’s just not going to work effectively. But hopefully now gamers understand how these two factors work properly, and when you buy your new favourite game, you can have some expectations of what’s soon to come.