As a person who only has access to a weak PC, I've never been one to be able to run much at medium-high settings on a PC and so I've always been grateful for game settings that may allow me to get a smoother framerate instead of not play the games I'd like to, at all. Fortunately, for me, the only PC-exclusive games that really seem to push PC hardware are shooters (Crysis, Metro 2033, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Battlefield 3)... and I don't care for shooters. What I care about are some RPGs, building simulators, and strategy games... which conveniently are relatively easy on hardware (Civilization, Sims, Spore, Mount and Blade, Minecraft, etc.). I even got the Witcher demo to run smoothly enough at lower settings, but I didn't care much for it. Now, even with a lot of these games, I tend to go for lower-medium settings to keep a decent framerate. For example, I downloaded the Mount and Blade (Warband) demo, earlier today, and promptly installed it. After I booted it up, I had to mess with the settings a bit. It was perfectly playable on near-medium settings, but during battles, the framerate dipped into the teens, sometimes, and low framerates irritate me more than almost anything else in the video gaming world, so I turned the settings down to low to maintain a constant framerate of 30+ at all times (it's at about 70 on the world map). Now, Mount and Blade is, by modern standards, not a pretty game, but I liked the medium settings' graphics. Low looks... bad, but it runs great and that's a sacrifice I was willing to make.

Here's where my problem comes in. Since I've always had relatively weak PCs around the house (laptops, specifically), I've been primarily been a console gamer (as in my more powerful platforms have always been consoles) since the SNES and worked my way up the chain of PlayStations to where I am now (with my PS3). I don't recall if I've ever had framerate issues with previous console generations, but this generation, I occasionally notice some lackluster framerates in some of my PS3 games (Dragon Age: Origins, for how terrible it looked, was a surprising culprit and my nominee for both the worst graphics I've seen on a PS3 and the worst framerates I've seen on a PS3). I have other examples besides Dragon Age: Origins, such as, for some reason, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (II ran more smoothly and they aren't graphically different: maybe it has to do with the size of Rome). I hate some of these framerates and something I've been wondering for quite a while is why don't console games have changeable graphical settings or changeable other game settings that may affect framerate? Of course, I'm not asking for higher settings being possible (We don't need to go around blowing up our consoles.), but rather for lower. Why do the developers always decide what the acceptable framerate for console games are? I'd scale back whatever I need to to get some higher framerates, but they won't let us. How difficult would this really be too implement? They could just copy it directly from the PC versions of games, in the case of multiplatform games, right?

P.S. Is Warband a different game from just Mount and Blade? I spent several hours playing the demo before I realized my evening had dissipated and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'd like to buy a copy of the game from Best Buy, but perhaps someone could recommend it or advise against getting it, first? I'm a very big fan of the building my own army aspect and I love the huge battles. I'm not too big of a fan of the combat, specifically, but racing around the desert on horseback while being chased by several enemy riders and seeing a battle of several dozen soldiers in the distance embodied sheer joy.

P.S. II: How many framerates per second are enough for the human eye to not notice anything odd?

Can't answer why consoles don't have graphics settings, but as for Mount and Blade, from what I understand, Warband is pretty much Mount&Blade, but vastly improved, so it's recommend to get Warband over the original. It was $6 on Steam a couple of days ago too.

As for FPS, I've seen people say that the human eye can't tell a difference of anything over 30 FPS, but when it comes to games, that is completely wrong. 30 FPS feels much different than 60.

warband is a seperate game from the original mount and blade. its on a newer engine so it has some pretty good graphics for an indie game. the modding community is also very strong and there are tons of mods to choose from. i personally use diplomacy and some sound and graphics replacers but diplomacy is a must have. if you had fun with the demo then you will love the full patched game since there were some big bugs in the initial release and also has more features that were missing in the demo.

they also have a new one out by a different developer but using the same engine called fire and sword which takes place in the 17th century eastern europe. sort of like how obsidian made fallout new vegas. its buggy (as usual for these games) so i would wait for a patch for that one.

warbands graphics arent to demanding and you can turn down alot of stuff. the only thing that might give you problems is if you want to run more than 150 per battle. i personally use between 200 and 250 on the battlefield but i have a powerful gaming computer.