Usually, id say FPS anytime. But now that I have a decent PC and the game lookes like it's from 2012, visuals are a yes right now.
For most people their CPU is the main bottleneck because of beamng's complex physics, so a more logical question would be do you want it to run faster or be less physically accurate?
I think BeamNG runs great at the moment, and looks fine too. Only thing I REALLY want fixed is the ridiculously slow and laggy UI.
It's extremely annoying, my PC can run 5 vehicles without going below 30FPS yet the UI barely works with just one car. I have to constantly pause and unpause to make it work.
For the cases where CPU is the main bottleneck or performance is unexpectedly low (the UI sometimes), reasonable efforts should be made to make the game run faster, yes. In all other situations though, I'd like the game to look significantly better by using a physically-based shading system (which the devs talked about in 2016 and is hopefully coming along). I once showed this game to my sister who doesn't play videogames and the first thing she said about it was "wow that looks so old", so there's clearly some room for improvement. Edit: Also, why do you assume in your poll that better visuals would *have* to come at the cost of lower FPS @gigawert ? High end GPUs aren't being fully utilized right now anyway, so improving visuals wouldn't necessarily decrease performance.
The thing is, compared to most modern games BeamNG has far lower requirements, the in-game maps have a great amount of detail, comparable to modern games i'd say. I'd like to see improvements in the day/night cycle and "PBR" being added to the game as it was brought up as a possiblity on one of the blog posts, it would greatly improve the game visually.
I hope for a more good looking game, but anyway the buggy shadows must be fixed it the game at least, at some angles it disappears completely.
The devs said in an early FAQ from years ago that BeamNG is all about physics and not about graphics. There is no compromise to physics, they need to be as accurate as possible because that is what BeamNG is all about! It's a hardcore realistic physics simulator. The FPS is one of the biggest challenges that the BeamNG dev team still need to overcome. They came a long way since release, but there still is optimization to be done so we could have races with big fields or traffic on the maps, who knows.
A bit of both would be nice. Get a bit more visual stuff and get a few more frames.. ATM I only get around 35 - 40 FPS with massive drops at some points. OK to be fair my computer is rubbish but still
As long as I'm getting at least 60fps, I will keep adding quality of visuals. But my PC is really powerful and runs a 144hz monitor so I can also benefit from turning down settings if I want max FPS.
60FPS Target, I then set the settings to get to 60FP (or there abouts) but I wont go down to 30fps since then it turns into a game imo instead of like a reality portal