Debunking The Need For 200FPS

Digital_Fusion writes: "If you follow the gaming sites at all you will hear about people that have tweaked their gaming rigs to give 200fps in games like Quake3. Do we really need this kind of framerate? Well no, according to this paper. It seems that anything over 72fps is just wasted as our visual pipeline is saturated past that point." On the other hand, I'm glad that companies make it possible to show crazy-fast framerates, for the trickle-down effect of cheaper "normal" cards.

Comments

Still can't go any faster than your display ...

[taniwha]

There's 2 things to consider here ....

• if your screen's phosphors are long persistance (TV for example) they limit how fast you screen can refresh anyway (it's a tricky balance - too fast and dumb VGA screens flicker, too slow and fast refresh rate screens blur ...)
• how fast is the display subsystem - large screen refreshing above about 250MHz (say 85Hz) is pretty close to impossible due to the imense amount of data needed to be sucked for the refresh process - this takes bandwidth away from poly rendering - above 250MHz is also a big problem for the analog portion of the subsystem (DACs, cables etc - the results can be smeared pixels)

Re:fics

[bellings]

these "frame rates" are what are probably causing me to lose chess matches online.

I'm sure they're also responsible for my miserable Karma.

Re:No point exceeding monitor refresh rate

[ez_TAB]

First of all, NTSC is an INTERLACED progressive scan rate @30fps, 60 _fields_per_second_. Also, most (if not all) ntsc monitors have phosphors that decay a lot slower than today's xga+ monitors. The slower decay coupled with 60 fields per sec means that you achieve motion that will look smoother than 60Hz on a computer monitor (at which most people will still percieve flicker.) Coupled with (as someone mentioned) the camera's natural motion blur this all adds up to motion smooth enough to fool the human eye. The point is that all technical errata aside, Pc's and Tv's are 2 different beasties.

Bogus

[toilet]

This whole debate has gotten silly. I personally don't agree with this, "I read in my psych book humans see at XX fps" tie in to Q3 frames.

Btw, this whole debate was held about a year and a half ago, only it was 30 vs 60 fps, because film only plays at 24 fps. 3DFX even released a 30 vs. 60 demo.

First, no matter what, your monitor is a strobe light. It is not a constant light stream. Unless you have perfectly synched frame generation with your refresh rate, there are going to be syncing issues. Some frames skipped, some drawn twice, etc. Those descrepencies are noticed.

Second of all, even if every refresh of your monitor drew one and only one frame of the world, it would still be a strobe light which is not synched up with your vision. Any person who sits at a computer all day with his/her refresh set to 100Hz can easily tell when the refresh is dropped down to 72Hz. Just as dropping down to 60Hz and opening up a solid white window is noticable to people in 75Hz land.

This was just a silly rant, but any one who plays at 100+ fps can tell the difference between the two. There are just way too many factors going into your visualization for any of us or the Canadian and his snowflake story to put a hard number on it.

Re:Sounds right to me....

[andyh1978]

I do know that sometimes when playing games with a uber-high frame rate, I sometimes get a 'bluring' effect that I don't get a lower frame rates.

Your card may be rendering at 200fps, but I bet your monitor isn't set to 200Hz vertical refresh!

And I don't know many monitors that would even handle that.

Since the only way to render at framerates above monitor vertical refresh rate is (obviously) to disable vertical sync (pausing rendering until the screen is updated), then you'll get tearing effects, as part of the screen is being drawn from data rendered in one frame, and the next part of the refresh uses the next rendered frame.

In fact, this shows that your data's being wasted; say for example 200fps on a 100Hz monitor, only half the data from each frame is actually drawn.

At high frame rates, the tearing effect probably causes the 'blurring' you describe.

Mouse sampling rate.

[al2]

Greetings (my first post). In games such as Quake III Arena, there are other very important factors to consider regarding smoothness, such as the mouse's sampling rate and sensitivity. Since you directly control the ingame POV with your mouse, it is imperative that your input is in sync with the video. Since high performance mice have high sampling rates (125hz for USB), 72 fps is simply not enough.

Re:worst experimental procedure ever

[Joe Decker]

I'm not sure what the eye's "maximum refresh rate" might be, but I know this is a stupid way to measure it. They should at least do it outside in full sunshine.

Not precisely, full darkness turns out to be better, which makes sense if you think about it.

But your point about interference with 60 Hz. (US) rates is dead-on correct. Working in the interactive TV biz I often have to deal with PAL monitors in the US, and there's a noticable worsening of quality of the PAL TVs (50 Hz. refresh) when they're illuminated by florescent lighting (I'm in the US, where the lighting flickers at 60 Hz.) So I turn the lights off, and work from the daylight from the window. (In my case, even then there may also be electrical interference yanking on the signal, I haven't figured out how to prove if that contibutes much to my perception of flicker on PAL TVs in the US--yet.

--j

Beyond the limits of human perception

[drteknikal]

I've seen this argument before. This time it's gaming. Last time, I think, it was IMAX. It is not simply a matter of anything beyond the limits or human perception being wasted. It's about providing a more intense experience. I occasionally run a psychedelic light show. Rule number one is that you START at the point of sensory overload, then pile on.

While you may not be able to visually process 200fps, you can most certainly distinguish a qualitative difference between 60fps and 200fps. The sheep who patronize Blockbuster don't know that the 220 lines they're seeing don't approach broadcast quality, let alone DVD/LaserDisc/Satellite - they're still able to boggle when they see a nice quadrupled high-res image at or above 1600 lines.

More data gives the brain more to work with, whether you can process every individual frame or not, subliminally you're going to pick up MUCH more information, and the result is a more intense experience.

Of course, not everyone runs their games on a 90" screen, either.

Absolutely Correct

[Captain_Frisk]

This is correct. What we should be looking at is worst case framerate. It doesn't matter how pretty CounterStrike looks when it runs at an average of 99fps. When it drops down to below 30 in wide open spaces with smoke grenades, then it really hurts. I want a guarantee of 72fps. As for this $600 video card nonsense, the GeForce2 MX does the job admirably, almost as well as the GeForce 2 GTS. Its only a hundred odd bucks, and makes a bigger difference than you think.

Captain_Frisk

Re:Absolutely Correct

[Sanchi]

If you can find it, get the old GeForce 256, its about 25% faster then the MX for about the same price if your lucky.

Sanchi

Re:Frame Rendering and Game Cycles

[Malc]

Isn't this what they do in Q3? I love the performance I get on my dual CPU machine. The framerate doesn't so rapidly when there is a lot of things going on. It's definitely using 2 threads of execution.

Re:Sounds right to me....

[hammock]

Thats only true if you keep up with buying (or more commonly, warezing) the newest Direct3D games, which are the same games as they were in 1994, with more intensive graphics.

I still play Quake and some addons for Quake2. I bought Quake3 for cheap on boxing day but didn't really like it.
Why would I want a 128mb agp4x card that pushes 200fps on some new Direct3D game that I will never play?

No more than 25 to 30 fps

[gallir]

The human brain hardly can process more than 25 to 30 frames images per second. Furthermore the images persist for about 0.05 to 0.1 seconds in our retinas. Cinema and TV are based on these samples values.

What it's important are image and colour resolutions. These discussion alreade took place when defining PAL standard. NTSC produces 30 fps, PAL only 25, but with better resolution.

And for graphic boards, it's more important the amount of polygons per seconds, which strongly depends on transfer ratio between RAM and VRAM (see PS2 threads....). I would say also that given that textures add a lot of realism with "little effort", it's more important to support lot of textures than more than 60-72 frames per seconds (yes, yes, its sounds as Murphy law, but it's serves aslo to avoid screen refresh artifacts).

--ricardo

Higer Framerates - Motion Blur

[szyzyg]

That's a reason for higher framerates - at 200 fps you can render the scene multiple times to create
proper motion blurring, by adding the images to each other.

Of course... a lot of games emulate motion blur anyway.... (who builds models for the bullets streaking towards you when you can jut do a streak in the air?)

There are motion blurring algorithms, I wonder when hardware motion blurring will become required for the next generation graphics cards?

What monitor are you using?

[ddstreet]

That's pretty impressive, I've never seen a monitor with a 200Hz refresh rate...mine maxes out at 72Hz, although I'm sure newer monitors are better. I know that if the FPS is higher than your monitor's refresh rate, you really won't be able to tell the difference in 100FPS vs. 200FPS, because there won't be any...

Re:Max is 78, min is 55

[andyh1978]

But don't movie cameras introduce temporal anti-aliasing, which would help reduce the effects of a lower framerate?

Absolutely.

Since computer graphics are instantaneous snapshots of the scene, it accentuates the frame rate a great deal.

Movie cameras show a 'blur' of the movement over the duration of the frame... i.e. temporal antialiasing.

Graphics cards are supporting spatial antialiasing, which give the impression of a higher resolution and smoothes those nasty jaggies at the edges. Temporal antialiasing could be the 'next big thing' (although the methods using accumulation buffers are years old, the hardware has to catch up). 3dfx have their T-buffer which could do such a thing, and aren't ATI producing a card with accumulation buffer support?

wrong...

[kawaldeep]

this writer makes many mistakes early on about the anatomy and physiology of the retina/brain system. He/She doesn't not understand cones and rods, nor the pathways (superior colliculus or laterate geniculate nucleus). For that, the rest of his article is flawed (remember, false assumptions lead to false conclusions).

Indeed, the major falacy is that we live in an analog world. No we don't! We live in a quantum world, and light is quantized. That in itself should set up the rest of the system (retina/brain) to behave more like a digital system. This is why (partly) we percieve moderate flicker at the movies, 24 fps doens't cut it. Nor the 60Hz (30Hz really, taking into account the interlace). Flicker stops when some part of the retina/brain system is fully saturated. I don't know if there is such a point, our bodies seem to have very large bandwidth.

Just a side note, I can see flicker on my 21 inch monitor at 70 and 75 Hz. I can still make it out at 80Hz, and at 100Hz it seems solid. Thank god for my video card...

Kawaldeep

This is bogus!

[2nd Post!]

Why is it nothing attacking the paper itself has been moderated up?

There was nothing scientific about how the 72+fps limit was calculated! As far a I can tell, the author judged by how much flicker he could perceive in the refresh of his monitor, to determine how much detail.

That's crap.

The refresh rate will only tell us about our persistence of vision effects. A refresh below a certain threshold does not trigger the POV to kick in, so that we can see the flashes of the monitor, whereas a refresh above that rate means our POV will start to blend the frames together.

The argument of 72fps doesn't limit the human visual system from seeing a fast moving object; if something traveling at a certain speed gets drawn on screen twice at 72fps, it will get drawn 4 times 140fps, and with a decent monitor at the right resolutions, those four frames should be seen on screen. The real argument, then, is whether the human reflex is fast enough to react to those 4 images (whether the visual system is fast enough to see all four frames, or just blur them together into one image, is irrelevant, I think). Can a person dodge a railgun?

Well, at least that's my 2cents

The nick is a joke! Really!

Re:Framerates and the Verticle Refresh Rate

[RedWizzard]

There is never, ever any need to try and push your framerate above the verticle refresh rate of your monitor.

Not true. Plenty of games have synchronous event handling. Faster framerate won't give you faster display but it will mean more responsiveness and/or more accurate physics in many games.

Perhaps useless for you, but not for your cat

[ArcticChicken]

I can't remember what FPS rate it takes to fool cats and dogs into thinking there's motion on a screen, but I know it's significantly higher than humans. I believe that's why it's rare that an animal that pays much attention to a TV screen. To most dogs, cats, etc., it's just a bunch of poorly-formed still images.

Perhaps this is a worthy cause for pursuing high framerates. Maybe someday you'll keep your pet occupied at home (watching TV) while you're out, or have your pet participate in your video games ... who knows.

Re:Frame Rendering and Game Cycles

[atw]

I beg to differ! Since dark ages of MSDOS games were parallel, and I mean games like Commander Keen, Wolf 3D, DOOM, etc!

There would be an Int08 handler (possibly reprogrammed to have more than meagre 18.2Hz freq like in DOOM) which would simply DRAW the CURRENT view scene, that's it nothing else, except for safe check to avoid re-entering same handler if rendering was slow for any reason.

Int09 (keyboard) would handle movements, which would only be someting like, change player actor X to X-10, and Int08 handler would redraw it next time. Same would go for mouse interrupt Int33, if my memory serves me well (callback function).

So, there was no such thing as the loop you described in all more or less well built games (id's). I actually did this thing like 6-7 years ago, no one it his sane mind would do differently these days, it's no longer state of the art approach.

Will we eventually start noticing?

[empurium]

Recently on slashdot, somebody posted an article about a new Sony CD Player (Click.) that dramatically increases CD sound quality. Takes it from 44,100 khz/sec, to 2.82mhz/sec .. Me and my dad got in a discussion about whether you would hear the difference or not.
It got me thinking, maybe we can't now, but if we start getting used to incredible sound quality, would we then listen to our current 44,100 khz/sec and be confused at how we used to listen to 44,100 khz/sec every day?
I started thinking this because if you listen to a lousy stereo system all the time, you get used to it, and it starts sounding decent. Then you travel to the nearest audio store, and listen to the newer, better stereos, you go back to the previous one and you suddenly realize how horrible your's sounds.

So is that the same as video? Sure right now we (supposedly) can't see above 72frames per second, but if our eyes got used to the 200 frames per second, would our eyes... adjust, so to say?

What is ALWAYS forgotten

[paeanblack]

There is one small detail that is almost ALWAYS forgotten when someone writes and article like this and talks about when you can and cannot see flicker. People don't watch Q3, they play Q3. Adding the hand-eye feedback loop to the situation makes q3 (et al.) a radically different experience from passive viewing. Human reaction times can drop below a hundredth of a second for expected events. This is why drag racers use the christmas tree starting lights and eliminate driver reaction as part of the race. Assuming monitor, mouse, vid card, etc are all up to spec and can handle >120 or >150 fps, the difference over 60-70 fps is very real for the player, but a passive viewer won't be able to tell. Simply watching for flicker to go away while you crank up the refresh is like asking the guy in the passenger's seat how the car is handling. He really has no clue.

Re:30 FPS .. not even the issue

[hammock]

Why would you want to debunk something, what does that mean anyway? Wouldn't it become bunk then, and isn't something that is bunk, not good?

Better res, not fps

[benno]

Surely the advantage of better graphics cards is to provide higher resolution rather than huge fps at low res?

I mean if you can do 200fps at 640x480 you should be able to bump it up to 1024x768 and still maintain a decent frame rate.

Benno

Latency not throughput

[mike260]

At 60fps, it takes an absolute minimum of 1/60th of a second for your input to make the round trip from the mouse, through the game simulation, onto the screen and thence into eyes. As your framerate increases, that latency drops off to almost nothing. 1/60th of a second of latency between input and feedback on that input quite definitely is perceptible - introduce an additional frame of latency (eg by using triple buffering) and the controls definitely feel more laggy.

So the reason you get that millisecond jump on someone running at a lower framerate is that you're effectively seeing a few tens of milliseconds into his future.

Re:You're missing the point.

[rosie_bhjp]

I couldn't agree more. The more % of cpu time you have idle while playing a game is that much more detail that can be thrown in the next version.

rosie_bhjp

Re:Monitor refresh rate

[andyh1978]

Even fairly weak monitors refresh at 60Mhz (thousand cycles per second).

Wrong on two counts.

1. Monitors refresh at 60-150Hz (approximately). That's 60-100 cycles per second.
2. MHz is not thousand cycles per second. It's million cycles per second. kHz is thousands of cycles per second.

what about resolution?

[bluelarva]

What about the maximum resolution that human eye can accept? How small does a pixel has to be before start confusing the computer screen with reality? I would venture to say that sound quality is pretty close to faking reality but visual display technology is whole different game.

No they dont!

[jonr]

An average monitor refreshes in 60hz, not Mhz, take a look at the article you pointed to yourself... :)

Re:Not true for Quake 3, at least

[tono]

the old "feel" was put back in the latest beta, the jump based on FPS however is not in the newest beta as it gave people an unfair advantage and amounted to cheating (flame me all you want I don't care) which they're ardently against. I personally think the damage through walls thing was wise to take out, as it's not realistic, however they could have special brushes for metal gratings or something that would give the damage through walls effect when it's useful, and realistic. I don't know which side of the fence you're on with regards to strafe jumping but I'm all for it, I don't know how coordinated you are, but I can run sideways and jump sideways and I would assume most other people can. The only thing that bothers me about quake3 is that bunny hopping is faster than running. If I remember correctly in the early tests it wasn't, but Thresh bitched about it so to quiet him Carmack made it so.

Sounds right to me....

[EFGearman]

"Well no, according to this paper. It seems that anything over 72fps is just wasted as our visual pipeline is saturated past that point." On the other hand, I'm glad that companies make it possible to show crazy-fast framerates, for the trickle-down effect of cheaper "normal" cards."

I do know that sometimes when playing games with a uber-high frame rate, I sometimes get a 'bluring' effect that I don't get a lower frame rates. Plus, if you don't have a top-of-the-line graphics card, the lower frame rate will allow you to process things faster. Plus, who really needs 200 fps??

Eric Gearman
--

Re:Sounds right to me....

[Robert S Gormley]

What? Are human eyes subject to Moore's Law too, now?

Re:Sounds right to me....

[Rico_Suave]

Actually, the monitor I'm working on has a 200hz refresh rate at 640x480. It's currently set at 100hz at 1200x1024

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Re:Sounds right to me....

[ToiletDuk]

correctamundo.

in q3a on a pII-450 with a GeForce2 GTS 32mb at 1024x768, I get between 83 and 98 fps in most indoor areas. but as soon as I walk into a large outdoor area or a big room, that drops to around 65-75. If I was able to extract another 10 or 20 fps from my card, I would be able to ensure that I'd almost always get supra-72fps performance... unless I was standing directly in front of a mirror while pumping it full of machine gun bullets which I'd put money on being the single most fps-limiting thing you can do in quake3. (can you say 12fps?)

• _____
• 
  ToiletDuk (58% Slashdot Pure)

Re:Sounds right to me....

[grammar fascist]

Plus, who really needs 200 fps??

If tomorrow's games throw twice the number of polygons at the graphics card, I might want one then.

Today's 200fps is tomorrow's 60fps...

Also related to Quake 3 and FPS, but off topic

[mahart]

Framerate also effects Quake3's physics:

Quake3World Messageboard Post

Hardcore people get a GeForce2 and play at 680*480*16 to maintain a constant high framerate because physics rounding errors are greatest at the higher framerates. Then they can make crazy jumps like the rail jump in q3dm6 and the megahealth in q3dm13. The 1.25 patch is supposed to fix this though.

And on topic, visually I can't tell the difference over 70fps in any game, so its ridiculous to play at 200fps if you can bump up the resolution or turn on other options.

Re:Also related to Quake 3 and FPS, but off topic

[Th3 D0t]

I find it ironic that the graphics engine behind quake made it famous yet in the quest to do well in the game every graphical option is turned off. Makes you wonder why they didn't just make it 2d stick figures? Oh yeah, then nobody would have bought it. But boy, people would use it.
---

Re:Also related to Quake 3 and FPS, but off topic

[Ziviyr]

No, its that stick figures are *VERY* difficult to hit. :-)

Re:Also related to Quake 3 and FPS, but off topic

[Domini]

People did not buy this for graphical effect only, but rather for it's control strength. Since it is a deathmatch only game, which halflife and Unreal are not, it is the perfect place to test skill.

And I do not play with all my options off... as cards give more and more power, you can put on certain fetures which may aid you. There are features which do not aid one, and these you will put off only in serious competitions.

Some people prefer high res and smooth to pretty. For some people these things are more 'sexy'.

;)
e.Lailoken.

Re:Monitor refresh rate

[Torak-]

Er...what?

Monitors' refresh rates are in Hz, not MHz, you freak.

The need for high frame rates

[bob_brisko]

Yes, Quake 3 may put out a needless 200 fps, but tomorrow's games will have larger enviornments and textures. Such hardware is needed, it's just a step of ahead of it's time. And even with today's games, will you constantly get > 200 fps? It's more of a cushion than anything else.

Re:The need for high frame rates

[8bahl]

What about the fact that higher FPS does not mean it is contantly at 200 FPS. So the higher frame rate the better your average will be above 72 FPS....

- Black Holes happen when God tries to divide by zero.

Re:The need for high frame rates

[katsumi]

I agree.. this is the most valid point of the whole thing; 200fps just means that for the time being it is able to handle an 'average' scene at 200fps; a machine that maxes out at 72fps will most likely drop pretty hard in a 'crusher' level or a more complex game/map/whatever. You want to have as high as possible to ensure the most consistent possible game play.

Re:Dumb analysis

[Fzz]

And on what concerns monitors. For me and several people 60Hz is deadly painful! Seat on a 60Hz monitor for the whole day and you surely get some serious headaches (specially on the temporas and inside the eyes). It looks like someone furiously turns lights on and off. On a 72-75Hz it is still visible the flickering. The minimal frequency for such aliens/mutants like me is no less than 85 Hz. And sincerly one gets tired working on such monitor. My good level is 100Hz.

One thing to note is that this does depend on the ambient light level. If the room is bright, and the monitor is turned to maximum brightness, you notice flicker much more than if the room is more dimly lit, and the monitor brightness is turned down a little.

Personally I really like LCDs, especially when I'm working for long periods - no flicker at all!

- Fzz

Re:Motion Picture frame rate is only 24 fps!

[Wdomburg]

>I think this whole "they project each frame
>multiple times" thing is some weird urban
>legend...

Sorry, but speculation does not make fact. If you bother to go to the rec.arts.movie.tech FAQ, they refer to how the use of a double-bladed shutter does in fact cause each frame to be shown twice.

The issue of the matter is how the human eye percieves light. By cutting the display time in half, even if it is the same image, the eye percieves change, thereby creating an optical illusion that cuts down on the perception of the actual jerkiness of the changing images.

As I am not disciplined in this field, I did not retain the information on this particularly well. However I have come across a large number of sites backing this up. (Mostly stumbled across when looking into HDTV and progressive scan video technology).

Matt

Re:Frame Rendering and Game Cycles

[BeanThere]

"I'm surprised to read that games like Q3 don't do this. (Physics depending on your refresh rate is just nutty.)"

Quake does do this, so the physics engine is not dependent on the frame rate. *However* there is a *bug* in Quake3Arena that makes the physics engine slightly different at different frame rates, but it is a bug, and doesn't have to do with the game loop design. The physics engine runs in a .qvm module, which runs on a virtual machine, and apparently there is a floating point rounding error in the virtual machine implementation itself that causes the bug. The newest patch is supposed to fix it.

As far as LionKimbro's post goes, I don't think there's too much difference between how you've mentioned it, and parallelizing it. Parallelizing it makes things quite a bit more complex - it sounds pretty beautiful on the surface, run your model/view each in their own threads and they can update at their own rates. But somewhere along the line these two threads must exchange data - and this happens often - every time something moves, every time something new joins, or geometry changes etc etc (all the time, in other words) - you can't just update that while your rendering thread is rendering. This isn't an easy problem to solve, it requires very careful design and thought into how the threads will communicate. We currently do our stuff the parallelization way, but one of the main reasons we do it is so that the application main thread cannot "accidentally" stop the simulation - e.g. if a modal dialog box pops up on the server applications, or the user presses 'alt' by mistake and the window enters the menu loop, then you don't want everything on the network to suddenly stop updating. So we run the simulation stuff in another thread.

Re:Frame Rendering and Game Cycles

[BeanThere]

"or the user presses 'alt' by mistake and the window enters the menu loop, then you don't want everything on the network to suddenly stop updating"

Forgot to mention .. an interesting example of this .. grab your mouse down on the scroll bar of a Quake3 dedicated server dialog box while people are playing .. :)

Re:Not true for Quake 3, at least

[tono]

Yeah, I'd agree.. which was atleast implied if not stated in my posten.

Re:Motion Picture frame rate is only 24 fps!

[Th3 D0t]

They should run at 48 fps, but every other frame is simply the interlaced combination of the current and next frames. That I'd like to see.
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What??

[Isldeur]

...women can see up to 30% more colors than men, so if a woman doesn?t think your outfit matches, she is probably right, go change)...

What? I have *never* heard this one. I'm currently a med student and have been more or less "in the neuro field" for some time before that. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'd love to see where that came from. A reference please?

Re:Yes, there is a need, penis size

[Th3 D0t]

Another fine example of why I will never be caught dead on IRC.
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FPS != Hz - Animation vs. Flicker

[darb]

(Note: I have no real expertise in visiual perception, I am just applying some common sense)

I can't say I a agree with the authors proof that we can percieve 60fps+. His simple experment involved human perception of flicker NOT animation. Yes it is true that most people can perceive flicker up to about 72Hz. But what we are talking about is a cycle between to completely different states, the moniter screen is blank for 1/120 of a second it is on for 120th of a second (ok this is over simplifing but you get the point).

This is completely different from animation. Animation is a gradual change from one scene to the next. It is much more difficult to distinguish subtle changes from one scene to the next then is to tell if something is on or off.

Imagine looking at a painting for a moment and looking away, then looking back a again. Would you notice a subtle change in the scene? Probably not (we are talking fractions of a second here). Now imagine you look at the painting, look away, look back and it is completely gone. Then I am certain you would notice. The two example are COMPLETELY different situations.

What is the human threshold of perception for fps. I really don't know but I would say it is well below 72fps or even 60fps. I would estimate it to be somewhere between 40 and 60 fps. Any thing more is a waste of CPU cylcles.

Personally I would gladly trade 60+ fps for better image quality or resolution.

(Note: many posters have also pointed out the difference between average and peak fps, so I feel no need for further comment on that here)

Re:Not necessarily true

[Masem]

It's usually not the video card's fault for incorrectly guessing the resolution of the monitor; blame the monitor detection scheme and/or database. It generally underestimates by lots, usually going to 60 or so Hz on 1024x768 (which is why I avoid going down the computer system aisles in any store - flicker!!).

A good program that fixes this is PowerStrip, not free but nagware, but all you need to do once (and then any time you reinstall) is ask it to first get the best rates for your monitor, then store those in the registery, so that you can pick and choose the refresh rates to use for that particular resolution. This will work with nearly all video cards. It's also got various tweaks, but best to go with card-specific tweaking programs for that.

Motion blur is useful for fast moving objects

[LameBrain]

by the authors own example he makes an argument FOR faster frame rates. as he notes, his snowflake will make discreet jumps in space when he is moving fast relative to it.

think about a rocket in Quake 3. if it flies laterally across your field of vision, it will be travelling so fast that it will make discreet jumps. if you have motion blur (or a high enough frame rate) it will look more natural. ie. you will see a streak instead of the discreet images.

this isn't critical for gameplay but does make a small improvement in the realism of the rendering.

Re:Framerates and the Verticle Refresh Rate

[Zagadka]

Plenty of games have synchronous event handling. Faster framerate won't give you faster display but it will mean more responsiveness and/or more accurate physics in many games.

Even in that situation, is there any point in actually rendering to the card? You're not going to see that frame, since your monitor can't keep up. Instead, they could do event handling, and then wait the amount of time it would've taken to render the frame, or perhaps even done additional event handling cycles...

Of course, doing event handling synchronously with rendering is a bad idea from the start.

Re:Monitor refresh rate

[B-B]

No.

70-85Hz is the avg refresh rate for a monitor.

Check it in your system settings yourself.

Cheers,
Tom

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[RedWizzard]

Perhaps you've forgotten, but you can still buy actual paper dictionaries :-) You tend to learn the correct spelling faster with a paper dictionary, too.

Even the editor didn't agree with the article

[arete]

The editor even said it is above 72, somewhere in the 100 range. I personally (and most men I know) have a hard time making out a 60 Hz refresh, even. But the majority of women (in a statistically uselessly small sample) could make out 70+

Also note that if you really could see 60, flourescent bulbs would seem to strobe for you. They don't for me, but ask around and you'll be surprised. (It works best with 1 direct bulb. More bulbs, especially on different circuits, can be at different parts of the cycle and meld together.)

But you CAN see a much shorter flash than 1/60th of a second. You don't see in strobe, you see the average of all light in the slice - the "shutter" is open the entire duration. Which is why you see a blur: it's the average of all the images from 1/whatever of a second. This averaging is why the sleepy hollow cardinal trick (and many others) work.

I'm not sure what good 200 fps does when your monitor rate (for a regular monitor, admittedly) tops out in the 80s. I think there are two reasons:

1 mentioned above, is extra capacity. 200 fps average might equal 60 fps during a fight scene.

but another reason is that even if you're displaying only 60 Hz (monitor limit) to have maximum smooth you need a frame refresh every 1/60 of a second, not just an average of 1/60th. And if frames take varying amounts of time to process, which they do, you could be unlucky and have 2 frame refreshes in 1 monitor refresh and then none in another... it would look like 30 Hz because only every other monitor refresh would be an unmodified repeat. This can happen even with BOTH the monitor and fps being at 60 Hz if the fps changes size (sinusoidally, in my example) and they two are not in sync.

FPS are not regular, and the reality is the fps is a measure of speed, NOT a reliable timing device. 200 fps != 1/200th each refresh... the first one after you turn is going to have to make many more changes, so it's going to take a lot longer, whereas many things will be reused in the next one. (this assumes nothing has to move to the card on the bus, which I won't go into) so if that refresh is 4x longer than average you'd be down to 50Hz for that frame. THEN you have to use an integer number of monitor refreshes, so it's going to be 30 Hz as viewed. Too much math, perhaps.

I predict that eventually (probably 1 more generation) many of the objects will be dynamically generated in sync with the monitor refresh. The framerate will be fixed at the (variable) monitor refresh rate. For each frame, one class of objects will be redrawn each time, no more and no less. The problem is that that class has to redraw asynchronously with any other kind of redraw, and that can be bad. But it's good for many kinds of animations... and depending on the architecture it should be no worse in any case.
you heard it here first.

Re:Even the editor didn't agree with the article

[arete]

I'm personally also relatively young and male, and while I'm nearsighted my vision is otherwise quite good... nightvision, low contrast, etc. I have to work really hard to see those flickerings... in the corner.

Partially I think I'm largely immune - I once experimented finding a "sweet spot" on a strobe light (it was a lot slower than you might think... 20Hz if I remember correctly) that made most people seem almost drunk, have some trouble walking... and I was just fine. Maybe I'm just blessed.

Flourescents getting ready to break should be flickering SLOWER if you can see them better... if they were flickering fast enough you wouldn't be able to.

There is another big difference in how they work from a monitor: they are sinusoidally powered, so there is a flicker, but the majority of the cycle is under at least some power.

A monitor has only a tiny little flash out of each cycle, so the flash is much brighter and everything else is much darker, and it is totally dependent on being above your refresh rate.

So the bulbs only have to be close...
But I also urge you to ask your friends and report back :)

Call me crazy, but...

[Jerry Talton]

That "paper" didn't actually prove a damned thing. It provided a fairly good description of the innerworkings of the eye, but I sure failed to see any logical correlation between "the eye works like this" and "you only need 72 (exactly) fps".

It seems to me that the line between "acceptable" and "realistic" is pretty thin. Technology will continue to advance, frame rates will get faster, more triangles will be produced, and things will become more and more "realistic". For games, at least, I think that the willing suspension of disbelief is far more important to how much fun one has than the number of triangles or the frames per second that get pumped up on the screen.

Furthermore, all of this talk about getting average fps up in the 300 range seems a little moronic to me, unless I'm missing some new monitor technology. I'm running at 1600X1200 at 85Hz right now, and as long as the monitor is only refreshing the screen 85 times per second, 85 effective "frames" per second is my absolute best case.

Re:goatse.cx

[JapBusinessmanInA2-2]

youre forgetting the next best thing to a man holding his gaping asshole open

70hz looks like flickering to me

[kevin805]

I'm male, but I'm young, and I have pretty good eyesight. My monitor is set to 70hz right now, and it looks like a strobe on the edges. Whereever I'm looking looks fine, but at the top of the screen (if I looking at the bottom) it's flickering.

It drives me insane. I just got a new monitor that will do 87hz at acceptable resolution, but I haven't gotten around to adjusting it yet (linux).

But there's a big difference between refresh rate and frames per second. I'm guessing if you got tricky enough with simulating motion blur, you could drop the frame rate down to around 20-30fps (film is 18-24) and still get acceptable quality.

Article displays embarassing lack of knowledge

[Blancmange]

I've given up counting the mistakes in the article. Here are a few corrections and interesting facts:

• Rods are sensitive but quite slow, compared to cones.
• An individual cone is either short, medium or long wavelength detecting. They are commonly imprecisely called red, green and blue. Red cones peak at green wavelengths.
• The bandwidth of the optice nerve is spectacularly low. John Carmack compared it to a 57.6kbps modem. He should know about these things. I tend to believe him.
• Cones are not 'inefficient due to their complex nature'. They are designed to be used in daylight viewing conditions, having fewer buckets of photosensitive goo than rods. Their small size makes them quick to respond.
• Most humans can reliably detect a flash of light dim enough that only one in a hundred rods will receive a photon.
• The optic nerve thingy is obviously more than 2-3cm in length, considering that the visual cortex is at the back of the head.
• Blurring is just what happens when a moving image is integrated over time. The viisual cortex doesn't have do anything special here.

It's hard to say what the maxinum frame rate a human eye can perceive directly is. It depends on the viewing conditions and the observer. In daylight, I can easily watch the progress of the video beam on a 50Hz TV as it makes its way from the top to the bottom in each field of each frame.

If 'frameless rendering' can be used (an option if real-time raytracing is feasible), then the natural smearing and removal of temporal aliasing in a quickly changing scene will lessen the need for a very high frame rate. Try searching for 'Frameless rendering'. I'm looking forward to Quake XXIV Bitchfight implementing it.

For pretty pictures and interesting reading, see
http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu /~a tkins/Neuroweb/retina.html


- I mean to win the wimbledon!

Your errors...

[mindstrm]

60Mhz would mean 60 Million cycles per second (not thousands).

And monitors have a vertical refresh rate usually around 60 - 85 hz (and higher). This is how often the beam traces from the bottom to the top of the screen (how many screens/second you get).

The horizontal sync signal is usually measured in Khz, which might be what you are thinking of, but this is only used to move the beam back to the left (or right, whatever...).

Dumb analysis

[Ektanoor]

What this guy writes is a mixture of secondary school knowledge and flamebait. Yes, he goes in some detail on how our eyes work but he strongly lacks some deeper scientific knowledge. A clear example:

"The visual cortex is where all the information is put together. Humans only have so much room in the brain, so there are some tricks it uses to give us the most information possible in the smallest, most efficient structure. One of these tricks is the property of motion blur."

Some tricks that produce motion blur... However he does not explain any details of what these tricks are. How human brain compresses information is still a question but this guy even does not touch this slightly. Only "tricks of the trade". Sorry people but he is very superficial. I am no expert on these things but I saw books and I know people who would explain more clearly for the layman these things. Once, Scientifc American published an excellent book exclusively dedicated to this problem. I think it would be worth to search for it.

On what concerns 72fps. Is he nuts? I can discern a 60-70 fps picture clearly from a 110 fps! On such level it is still well seen how things go hickcups.

And on what concerns monitors. For me and several people 60Hz is deadly painful! Seat on a 60Hz monitor for the whole day and you surely get some serious headaches (specially on the temporas and inside the eyes). It looks like someone furiously turns lights on and off. On a 72-75Hz it is still visible the flickering. The minimal frequency for such aliens/mutants like me is no less than 85 Hz. And sincerly one gets tired working on such monitor. My good level is 100Hz. Yes there I can work without feeling any stress. Btw. When working, I pass more than 12 hours day in front of the bright head of the computer. In fact, my work turns frequently to 36 hour shifts (like today, I'm in the 17th hour). So guys, maybe I mutated too strongly... >:E

Well, I don't know where this guy took his theories but my everyday work tells me he's nuts. So much for the theory.

Re:Dumb analysis

[Zulu]

The fool thinks himself to be wise.
The wise man knows himself to be a fool.

Re:Dumb analysis

[Gorobei]

Quite right - this is a poor acticle. He basically pulls the 72fps number out of the air (maybe because that is his monitor's max refresh rate?)

Any article that takes about maximum preceptible update rates without describing how the test was done is going to be poor science. E.g. showing film at higher and higher fps tends not to work because film-makers are attuned to shooting scenes designed to be viewed at low fps rates. Films tend, by design, to have a single area of focus in each shot.

To really see what the eye wants in terms of fps, you have to give it tough tests, e.g. track the ten mosquitoes buzzing around your head, focus on the closest threat for long enough to squat it. Or alternatively, track six enemy fighters in your flight-sim, judge each one's orientation and heading, and focus on the most valuable target while making quick glances at the others. In situations like this, people improve at the task when given higher frame rates (up to, and beyond 150Hz!) Lower frame rates cause progressively more jerky saccades (the rapid eye movements between points of focus) because the eye has trouble making at exact jump to the new point of attention (it gets in the ball park, and then tends to undershoot and overcorrect for the target because the expected point of interest isn't rock solid.)

Re:Dumb analysis

[sarum]

It is better to be a witty fool
than a foolish wit - Shakespear.

Re:Bah

[mindstrm]

Because we're bored with their crappy engine, and have been waiting patiently FOREVER for tribes II to come out.

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[MrBogus]

The goal of hardware tweakers is to get the maximun effects while not droping below that critical point of 60 ftp (or 72 as that article clames).

So, why is the common practice to quote the maximum framerate and not the minimum framerate?

Why are "timedemo" tests usually lightweight compared to actual gameplay?

You're right on, but I don't think the dicksizing motivations should be ruled out either.

Re:Frame Rendering and Game Cycles

[vslashg]

Is this really true everywhere?

I remember reading the Allegro docs (game programming library for DOS) that suggested setting things up in a non read-eval-print way.

There was just a callback that incremented a volatile variable "turns" or whatever once for every unit of game time that passed. They recommended the main loop be implemented thusly:

while(game_is_still_going_on)
{
while (turns>0)
{
DoGameLogic();
turns--
}
DoScreenUpdates();
}

Which was simple, and didn't impose any control lag greater than one screen refresh. I've never done any hard-code games programming, but this has always worked for me. I'm surprised to read that games like Q3 don't do this. (Physics depending on your refresh rate is just nutty.)

I mean, there's probably a reason. I'm just asking what it is.

Re:Motion Picture frame rate is only 24 fps!

[ez_TAB]

Well for 24fps (film) animation we generally add a bit of motion blur to any 3D motion we've created, I'm sure that 2d animators have some equivalent. The same goes for 3D generated for 29.94fps ntsc. Otherwise, although the picture would generally appear constant, the motion would strobe rather badly as the character appears first
Here......then Here............then Here.

Re:Critical Flicker Fusion

[Trepalium]

Don't forget the wonders of floresent lights that usually also flicker at 60Hz, however almost never in sync with the monitor's refresh rate flicker, worsening the effect. Then there's different issues with the phosphors on the monitor themselves, which, depending on the manufacturer, hold their charge for different lengths of time. There's enough varience in manufacturing of the CRTs that can cause one monitor at 70-75Hz still have noticable flicker, but others at that same refresh rate will not. There's a tradeoff with it, of course. The longer the phosphors hold the charge, the more likely you are to get motion blur effects, however you have less flicker at lower refresh rates. With phosphors that lose their charge more quickly, you have a very responsive display, that shows extreme flicker at lower refresh rates.

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[Sanchi]

Its the average framerates that are quoted tho

Sanchi

I'll tell you why

[Viking Coder]

1. Motion blurring - if you have four times as many frames per second as your monitor can display, then you can motion-blur those frames together for a MUCH more realistic-looking effect. See the difference between Toy Story and early computer animation? The early stuff looks like stop-motion photography, because that's essentially what it is.

2. Latency - If you can render twice as fast as the monitor can display, then you can hold off rendering until the last possible instant before the monitor needs to display something. That means that you're out of synch with the monitor by half as much as a scene that had to be frozen in time twice as long ago and rendered. The distance between Start Render and Display being reduced means that the difference between Display and Interact (moving the mouse for instance) feels less laggy.

3. AI - everyone in the gaming industry has read about how great T&L (Texture & Lighting) hardware is, mainly because it frees up your processor to work on other things - like physics and game AI. This is not just smoke and mirrors, folks - the more capable the graphics hardware gets, the more freedom the game has to do fancy math in the background. This includes collision-detection and other kinds of physics, AI including path planning and other realism details...

4. Stereo - if you can double the frame-rate, that means that you can theoretically render a stereo view in the same time. With flickering glasses, or any other technology. Strongly related to the latency question above. (Of corse the monitor needs to be good.)

5. Reflections - the more times you can render a scene in a given amount of time (one vertical monitor painting) the more reflections of images you can incorporate into a scene. If you can render twice as fast as you need to, then you can display a reflection of the current scene in the mirror on the wall, or the polished hard-wood floor, or even the reflections off the metal of your gun. These effects add strongly to realism. I'm going to also count realistic shadows in this category.

6. Full-Screen Anti-Aliasing - render at four times the resolution your monitor can display, and use interpolation to display the best looking color at each pixel you can. Or nine times. Or 25 times.

If you give me 50 times the memory and 200 times the frame-rate, I'll use it - no lie!

Not to mention the fact that it was recently shown by someone at SGI that you can render a scene in OpenGL with multi-pass texture operations that looks IDENTICAL to the same scene drawn in RenderMan (PRMan) - the tool that Pixar uses to render. The math is the same, it's just done in a different way. The point is that you get closer to being able to render A Bug's Life in real-time. That's a good thing. A very good thing.

Re:worst experimental procedure ever

[mindstrm]

Though everything you say about flicker is true...

Many people can notice flicker, even in a completely dark room.

I usually work in a dark room, and even at 75hz, I notice flicker on my screen. 80 is tolerable; 85 is just fine.

Interesting note about the tool shop, btw..

Somebody already said this well, but...

[adwyerterran.com]

Dude. The point is this. When an object is moving fast across the screen, it has some delta that it chunks between on each frame. I don't care how fast the framerate is, I can make an object move fast enough that it makes a large jump in space each frame. That looks like crap. The faster the framerate, and the smaller the deltas, the closer to real motion blur you get.

Motion blur techniques that exist today either suck, only work for certain conditions like heli blades, or only apply to making framerate limited situations like theater movies look reasonable.

I can always make something fly by so fast that it only exists in the center of your screen once. Sure it was only there for 1/800 of a second, but it sure doesn't look like it would in real life.

Re:Max is 78, min is 55

[rlk]

I don't believe 30 is enough to see really fluid motion. Motion on a TV never really looks fluid, and I believe that a lot of the disorientation that accompanies some Imax films is less from the very large screen than from the refresh rate being too low to permit really smooth motion.

I've found even a very simple scene, such as watching a wheeled vehicle move, in an Imax movie to be disorienting. The part of the view that seemed to cause me particular trouble was the wheels turning.

I think it also depends on the "velocity" of an object in motion on the screen. Very fast moving objects require faster update than slower moving objects. The test (which is admittedly imperfect) that I use is to turn my head rapidly from side to side. Even at 80 Hz refresh rate I can see the discrete frames. Again, this particular test has a lot of problems, and I may be testing the wrong thing, but I suspect that the reality lies somewhere between the 72-80'ish fps of the article and the 200 fps that some people are trying for.

Re:Motion Picture frame rate is only 24 fps!

[mindstrm]

No.. that simply adds to retention.. so the images is 'there' longer.. there is still the same amount of animation happening.

Re:these cards are still important

[evvk]

Polygons are ugly. I hate today's 3D and they have to put it everywhere just because it is 3D and therefore cool. Many old hand-drawn games (that don't need a 3D environment) used to be pretty, now similar games are filled with ugly boxes that try to mimick people and all. (Yes, I'm talking about adventure, a genre which seems almost dead too).
If realistic look is what is wanted, I think we should go for real-time raytracing with geometric surfaces, bezier patches, real lighting and all, not continuing with approximating everything with polygons.

Here's a different test...

[hpsolo]

While staring at your monitor, stick your tongue out so that it touches both upper and lower lip. Then blow so that you end up making "farting" noises as a result of the lips slapping against your tongue. You'll notice your monitor's refresh rate for sure.

Re:worst experimental procedure ever

[ConceptJunkie]

Fluorescent lights at 60Hz certainly make 60Hz refresh much worse, but 60 Hz is very flickery for me in any light (or none). It's clear this perception is different for different people.

Rick

Re:Motion Picture frame rate is only 24 fps!

[Zagadka]

Explain to me how showing the same frame twice for 1/48 seconds is and better than showing it once for 1/24 seconds? Answer: it isn't. In fact, there is a small delay between showing frames. If you show the frame twice for 1/48 second you're actually going to double the amount of time that there's nothing on the screen! (because you're effectivly "turning off" each frame for a small duration in the middle) This is like telling someone that if they blink really fast, it'll make the movie appear more smooth...

The reason film can get away with such a low frame rate while CRT can't is that film projectors don't scan each frame. They project the entire thing simultaneously.

I think this whole "they project each frame multiple times" thing is some weird urban legnd created by a guy who watched a rented movie frame-by-frame, noticed that some frames were doubled, and then made this totally incorrect conclusion. Either that, or you're getting confused by interlacing (which makes 30 frames/second into 60 fields/second in NTSC, 25 to 50 in PAL). Tricks like interlacing make no sense for film, because (once again) film is projected an entire frame at a time, unlike CRTs which scan the frame/field with a raster.

(If you watch a movie that was originally 24 FPS film and then converted to [30 FPS] NTSC, you'll see that every 5th frame is a duplicate of the preceeding frame. So for every 5 consecutive frames, there are really only 4 unique frames. 4/5 = 24/30)

200 FPS great for slow motion playback!

[Anonymous Coward]

Record your game and then replay key events in slo-mo to see where you fucked up so you can improve the next time around!

Re:200 FPS great for slow motion playback!

[telstar]

Game replay data isn't usually stored as an AVI ... it's possitional information, so you can replay it at any speed you want, regardless of how many frames are displayed at runtime.

Re:200 FPS great for slow motion playback!

[atrowe]

I hope you've got a Mighty big hard drive to store an entire quake game at 200 FPS.

Re:200 FPS great for slow motion playback!

[LiTHium[ion]]

If the game really were only 20 Hz what good do the extra frames do? If I were playing at 20 fps shouldn't it not affect my skill, only the pleasantness of the game?

fics

[ichimunki]

Are you people saying that my video card and these "frame rates" are what are probably causing me to lose chess matches online and to never quite get all 40 bonus bugs in the Galaga challenge rounds? Should I be looking for a new card, or will adjusting the resolution help?

Re:30fps

[Aqualung]

People have been blowing the "The eye can only see 24fps" bull for years. It's about time someone set them straight, even if it's only to say, "Oh, wait. It's not 24fps the eye can see. It's 72fps. Yeah, that's it." Of course, down the road, that'll change to, "Wait, it's not 72fps, but 100fps," and then "Wait, not 100fps, but 200fps," and so on. Seems to me the only reason for this is to make people not feel so bad about not having the latest and greatest video card out there.

No, grasshopper, there's a difference. At 30-ish FPS, the brain begins to "fill in" the jerky collection of frames it's seeing and creates the illusion of smooth motion. Ever looked at a TV program in frame-by-frame mode? It's really amazing just how much 'filling-in' the brain does, how easy we are fooled! It's actually even more noticeable with cartoons (e.g. the simpsons or something) At some point however, the visual data has to come in at a point where the eye cannot percieve the difference between the generated image and reality... with NO mental filling in. There is a difference, and most of us can percieve it at one level or another.

----
Dave
MicrosoftME®? No, Microsoft YOU, buddy! - my boss

I can distinguish 85 fps

[MattFoley]

Ahh, the contentious frame rate question again, *sigh*. For years we've had the 60 fps cap forced on us by anyone who believed whatever they read and didn't make the effort to find out for themselves at what Hz they could no longer distinguish an improvement. Personally I can distinguish 85 fps and I know people who can do close to 100. Jack the fps up to 150 then back it down to 80, see the difference? It's a pretty easy thing to test scientifically if you have one person setting frame rates and the subject is consistently able identify when the fps is below his threshold. In quake you want the average framerate much higher than your perception threshold, because when 6 players pull out their plamsa guns your fps are really going to bottom out. Until Carmack recently patched Quake 3 certain physics were also linked to framerate, that's why some people (who turned off anything that would slow the game down) could do jumps that to most people were simply impossible =). I haven't played for a long time now, but I'm sure there are still plenty of servers running with the unpatched version to preserve this advantage for 31337 players.

Re:I can distinguish 85 fps

[lcs-150]

Exactly, the point of higher fps is so that when you get more geometry in the game, moving at high speeds, etc. and the framerate drops, it's not as much of a bump-down, and won't disturb your gameplay too much. A good thing to remember is that most fps benchmarking utilities (like the one built into the quakes) are based on the average framerate rather than the minimum one..the most important number, as far as I'm concerned, is the minimum FPS that a game reaches, rather than the average. Also, from what I've seen, alot of these numbers are based on 640x480 or whatever...I don't know anyone who plays at that sort of resolution for normal gameplay...

Re:I can distinguish 85 fps

[Robert S Gormley]

That's impressive, given that depending on resolution and monitor, you're limited to 75,85, or maybe a max of 100 fps

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[Sanchi]

Eventually, we will have to add some more benchmarking for all the shaders, particle animations, and soft body dynamics that are starting to come accelerated by hardware now.

go to www.madonion.com What they are able to make you computer display will astound you. I have alwayes been amazed watching 3dmark 2000. Just rembemer that it does run under windows and user the "evil" Microsoft Direct X.

Crimoney, why aren't our sound cards this advanced? Where's analog modeling synths, 3d stereophonic positioning, DSP effects, and other goodies we could have accelerated on the card?

If you have ever ran livewarefor the SB Live, it supports this (analog modeling synths and 3d stereophonic positioning for shure, dont know about DSP tho) My guess is that no one (not even creative) has spent enought time to try to port it to linux. Even tho, the SB Live is the shit.

Sanchi

um...

[Zulu]

Are we blind? Do we just reply without reading any other posts? There's nothing more annoying than reading the _exact_ same argument posted 900 times...

Re:Stupid USians!

[atrowe]

Actually, the PAL format, while lacking that all important extra 5 FPS, is considered my most to be far superior to the NTSC standard which your girly USian televisions use.

Re:Why "Anne Marie" is really Signal 11

[MrScience]

I'm sorry, did anyone know that Signal11 was a guy to begin with? It's not a very gender specific name. Maybe it's Signal's real name?

Wouldn't that be a hoot? :)

Re:Monitor refresh rate

[Bun]

Sort of. We are talking about 200 frames per second when we talk about frame rates. Even fairly weak monitors refresh at 60Mhz (thousand cycles per second). Check out http://www.d-silence.com/video/refres h.h tm for a better explanation.

You are confused. The monitors refresh the entire screen at the vertical refresh rate. So in this case, if your vertical refresh rate is 75 Hz, it refreshes the screen 75 times per second. So if your video card is providing more than 75 frames per second, you will not be seeing all of them. I don't think this is a very big deal. As has been stated elsewhere, high average framerates are important for maintaining adequate framerates in critical situations. Or at least as 'critical' as a game can be.

The link you provided there says nothing about weak monitors refreshing the screen at 60MHz. It merely describes driver issues in Windows with regards to setting monitor refresh rates.

Physics

[Kooshman]

Really, if you look at the question asked the writer specifically mentioned "in games like Quake III." True, it's fun to crank up the framerates, but as some Slashdotters have mentioned, it's useless to go past the refresh rate of your monitor; skip perception, it just isn't coming any faster no matter what the number says. The reason to to it is the physics bugs in Quake III native to super-high frame rates. Otherwise, these crazy rates might have been much more passing in mention. What we need to start considering is realistic images. When will we have computers that can even render a slide show that looks 100% realistic? One thing that comes to mind is Star Wars E1. Mr. Lucas spent big green on making very realistic stupidity (die JarJar), but it still has that computer-rendered quality. Realism will be the next jump, since that nice man with his essay pointed out that there is a definite fps limitation on human sight, and we have technology that passes it up on these polygon-based worlds. ~the Koosh man

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

One thing he forgot to mention

[Ektanoor]

A "real 3D world" or better saying 3D systems that give you the feeling of a real 3D world. Really this is the result of a conversation i had with one friend about 3D glasses & Co.

As far as I know there is always a lag between screen frequencies & fps. On glasses systems this is quite visible. To get a 50 fps you need a 100Hz monitor as minimum. To get higher rates you need a monitor going nearly 2 times the fps rate. So it is quite logical to try to achieve 200fps as they also have to be divided in glasses systems. However then, monitors should reach a cool 200-300Hz to give a chance for your eyes.

I have never see a glasses system but some friends around here tell that presently that is the same as burning you eyes for good. So let's wait the 200's

Eh? Re:You are right it's not real

[Naysayer]

I am a game programmer. What you are saying is not correct.

PC games that run at 200fps really are updating each frame with a delta-T of (1/200) and redrawing.

I have no idea why you would think otherwise.

-Jonathan.
Bolt Action Software

Re:Eh? Re:You are right it's not real

[BlackHat]

Why? As I said most games use a fixed clock and update video via thread or some other switching method. Using the Draw rate as your game clock is not good idea unless you are making a flightsim or physics demo. Name me a 3d game that is based of Delta-Time of the last frame it sent as its update clock speed for next. You have no way of guessing what the time-cost will be of the next frame so you keep to fixed rate. I ask you to explain why you think it is.

Sprite and Blitter games going direct to video-ram maybe but then you are waiting for V-Refresh to update anyway. So I still say its not real.

Re:Eh? Re:You are right it's not real

[hfield]

Your knowledge of game technology is not quite up to date. That was true maybe 6 years ago. Yup, it's sad being totally wrong and stuff but you really should try to move on.

Re:Eh? Re:You are right it's not real

[BlackHat]

Learning more every day

retina refresh rates

[hexdef6]

This guy doesn't know what he is talking about. It is obvious he has done some research, but he doesn't seem to have a grasp on the subject matter. His assertion that rods are more "efficient" than cones is ridiculous. The increased visual acuity around your periphery is because there is a tighter grouping of visual receptors (in this case rods) there. Obviously more receptors means more details picked up.

Another thing, the idea of a super fast image that is flashed to an audience, and perceived is not unbelievable even if the "refresh rate" of our retinas is around 60 fps. The flash on the screen could very well be during the "exposure" time of the retinas, and with multiple people viewing, it is certain that someone will see it!

Jaeger
www.JohnQHacker.com
GodHatesCalvinists.com

Re:worst experimental procedure ever

[BandSaw]

Flourescent lights flicker at 120 HZ, not 60.. The lamp lights on both the positive and negative half of the 60 HZ waveform.

Oneday...

[redd]

Oneday, in a dreamworld not far from here, X or OpenGL will support a "vertical sync" instruction just like the good old days, and we can say goodbye to jerky scrolling. Not just in games, but in "less", "netscape", in fact, anything that moves stuff around. You'll actually be able to read the text scrolling up the screen because it's clear!

No wait.. we've been lacking this feature since 1992.. because (usual response) "it won't be supported on all hardware". Fine! Make the instruction just return on hardware that can't generate the appropriate IRQ!

Computers are shitty these days.

It CAN have an effect-Your brain changes

[pantherace]

Studys I have heard about say that when someone is exposed to a high speed environment, your brain begins processing the images faster. Two places this has been seen: Gamers with high frame rates, and pro baseball players. The brain speeds up the FPS that can be seen by the person.

My question is: what is being lost, in other areas?

you CAN see 200 FPS

[neilv]

Most of the "science" in the article referenced was anything but (as one poster noticed, flicker comes partly from the interference between screen and electric lighting). However, as the article's editor pointed out at the very bottom, it has been demonstrated that the human eye can register an image displayed for less than 1/200 of a second.

200fps vs Visual perception

[FeeDBaCK]

Well, quite frankly people don't take into account a few things. Benchmarks are not done *in* a network game, but instead on a machine running a demo which is just recorded play. Things such as lag an server overhead are not taken into consideration during most benchmarks. These do effect gameplay adversely. If I have a system that can do 200fps, it has more visual updates of the player and object motions. This makes things such as dropped frames and the "jumpyness" of lower fps games less apparent to the player as he is in the middle of a fragfest. This is especially true in the new crop of higher visual quality games. More frames == More updates. This has caused problems in some games. It allowed for the extra high jump in Q3A. It allows for people to move faster in many games. In Descent 2, one of the interesting things high framerate did was improve the accuracy of the "homing" system used for the homing/mega missle. If you were on a higher fps machine, the missles were more accurate due to the missle only being able to move at the beginning (or was it end) of each frame.

Higher framerates also tend to produce more accurate control for the player. If your framerate is higher, more precise control is available to you than to someone barely pushing 60fps. This can easily be seen if you take something such as glQuake and Quake 3. Play them side by side. I can guarantee you will get more accurancy in tageting in quake due to the higher framerate.

Re:Average frame rate isn't the issue

[Seumas]

Playing Q3 in 1024x768, trilinear, high-detail, full quality everything, I peak at 130fps on my 64MB Radeon and 150fps on my 64MB GeForce Ultra2.

In the midst of battle with body parts and rockets flying everywhere (clarification: my body-parts; someone elses rockets), my rate easily drops down to 90fps. Very rarely, I'll catch it plummeting as low as 70fps or 60fps. I can't really tell any difference between 70fps and 150fps, but anything below about 60fps is noticable to varied degrees.

As long as you can still aim and shoot fluidly, you're fine. Anyone who is still moving fluidly at the heaviest point of graphic intensity shouldn't worry about tweaking every last frame out of their system. Unless there is some revolutionary change in the industry, I don't plan to upgrade my cards for a long time to come (until we see games that drop my frame rate enough that I can notice it). I'm certainly not about to dump a few hundred more on a card just because I can achieve 200fps, when 150fps will more than do.

Besides, what is more irritating is the games with the poor net framework that makes finding a fast server impossible. While Q3's code seems to be sleek (I usualy find a lot of servers averaging between 12 and 30 ping), other games (Unreal Tournement, to name one) rarely have anything below 100 and only a few under 200 ping. Even the sweetest frame-rate can't help poor network performance.
---
seumas.com

Re:I'm not a gamer, but...

[Ziviyr]

If you can only display 85Hz and you're getting 200 FPS then the game should try mixing the excess frames. That way when you start getting 10,000 FPS you also get a decent motion blur. :-)

a little physics

[anonpoet]

This article totally misses the point. It focuses on what we can see clearly and misses why we want such high refresh rates - aliasing. To understand aliasing think about a wheel with a red dot on the edge. The wheel spins around once every second clockwise. If we were to snap a picture every second, the red dot would be in the same place every time. It we played back those pictures, the red dot would appear to be stationary. Now suppose we decided to speed up our snapshots. If we took a picture every 3/4 of a second, the dot would appear to spin BACKWARDS at a rate of one turn every 4 seconds. Accoring to nyquist, we have to take a picture at twice the rate to make sure we don't have aliasing. People's eyes take snapshots at about 30 frames a second (what he should have said in the article), but not everyone's. Especially people who use computers all the time (they speed up your sampling rate). It is not uncommon for a gamer to have a sampling rate of 48-49 frames a second. That means you need to be pumping out near 100 frames a second to compensate. One of the reasons it is nearly impossible to fool someone that a picture is a real world object is because of aliasing. There is a special section of your brain that performs anti-aliasing. Images are delayed in this section until the anti-aliasing is performed. If Anti-Aliasing can't be performed, you feel sick. (As in some of those games we all play or when you put your monitor in 56Hz mode). If this section of the brain doesn't detect any jitter, it just passes the image straight through making your response time faster. This is why good gamers turn down the detail in preference for faster frame rates. Sorry dude, you are WAY off the mark. anonpoet

He's wrong

[catseye_95051]

Plain and simple.

Look up information on Doug Trumbull's Showscan(tm). Showscan is 120fps film and the result is astounding. I've seen Showscan-- the Luxor's "Present" show in the Past, Present and Future trilogy is Showscan. Go to vegas and see it yourself.

What you get is vastly improved sense of "presence." Its much like the difference between vinal and CDs in audio but visually.

Luxor tells everybody that its a live show, and people believe it because it is so life-like.

Re:Bah

[mindstrm]

Hey..dont' have to 'splain it to me. I love tribes... it just started to get a bit stale.
And tribes II is taking an awful long time, though I'm definately a customer when it comes out.

The 'render extremely large areas' shoudl read 'render extremely large areas with very little detail'. Any map that has lots of structure on it bags down in a hurry; rolling terrain is great. On that note, though, i agree, that's what made tribes really cool.

Watch what you say about rendering though.. indoors or outdoors, as soon as you have lots of structure or detail, tribes bags.

And tribes rocks on team fortress, I agree. Tribes is awesome.

I'm not a gamer, but...

[sconeu]

So you get 200fps. Big deal, if your vertical refresh is only 85Hz, then you only SEE 85fps, regardless. An earlier poster had it right, the reason you want a 200fps max is so that you don't drop below the critical rate of 72 (60) fps where animation artifacts start to show up.

Oversampling

[Some guy named Chris]

Why wouldn't the same thing apply visually?

Re:Oversampling

[Ella the Cat]

Look here.

Re:Oversampling

[Some guy named Chris]

What I was trying to say was that oversampling has been used for years in high end digital audio as a smoothing technique, removing some of the harshness of the sound by making transitions less abrupt.

Why wouldn't the same thing work in the case of visual representations?

Not usually but when the action hits..

[Duke of URL]

You don't need 200FPS, but when the action hits and there's alot going on in the screen the normal FPS can drop significantly. I've been fine playing with 30fps or less and had no problem kicking butt. Perhaps if I was playing for money I'd want overkill of having 200FPS, but it'd still be overkill in most situations.

Re:Not usually but when the action hits..

[h3x0r]

Someone mod this guy up. He's exactly right. The ridiculous frame rates are average frame rates. In fact, many (vendor-used) benchmarks record only the peak frame rates! The high frame rates are not at all consistent. All a high frame rate number tells you is that it will slow down less in statistically rare yet painfully common-seeming 'busy' moments.
---

Something else to consider

[daveman_1]

It is perhaps true that one cannot perceive difference in images beyond 72FPS, however can anyone think of a video card that never allows scene rendering to drop below 72FPS? Most frame rates are listed as maximum frame rates, and the better ones are listed as average frame rates. In other words, without incredibly high frame rates there is the potential for improvement at the low end in an extremely complex scene. Which brings my next point to light... The more complex the scene, the more video power is required to render it. When every computer out there is able to push 200 FPS on current generation games, you can bet that the top of the line games will require it just to run. True, they will be much more advanced than current games, and I think that is a good thing.

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[ToneHog]

The actual necessities that should be considered should be maximum polygons on-screen while still staying above 80 fps. Texture really isn't much of an issue, considering that 64 Mb graphics cards are going to be around the corner at quite an affordable price soon. So what's that leave? NURBS, and polygons, of course. Eventually, we will have to add some more benchmarking for all the shaders, particle animations, and soft body dynamics that are starting to come accelerated by hardware now. Benchmarks need to be more standardized, and have a minimum frame rate allowable for using these benchmarks, so that these cards may more readily be shown their true performance. Crimoney, why aren't our sound cards this advanced? Where's analog modeling synths, 3d stereophonic positioning, DSP effects, and other goodies we could have accelerated on the card? Wouldn't that be easier than graphics, nowadays?

Factual errors in referenced paper

[BWJones]

I would just like to point out that there are a number of factual errors in the referenced paper. I am sorry, but this article popped up on a busy day and I do not have time to list them all. However, if you are interested, check out our Webvision site here: http://insight.med.utah.edu/research/basic_science _research.htm It should clear up any questions people had regarding the article and the biology and physiology of vision.

deja vu

[_UnderTow_]

I seem to remember this argument about 2 or 3 years ago. About the time the voodoo2 SLI setup was popular. I remember articles saying everything over 30 FPS is a waste. The people that write these stupid articles should take a look at the drivel that people before them have written.

FPS does make a difference

[Pov]

I used to proclaim to my friends with sweet setups that over 60+ fps was all the same until I got a GeForce. The human eye may not be able to distinguish the difference, but the playability still goes up. With the higher frames you are more likely to get that millisecond jump start on someone that doesn't have it and the world is displayed more smoothly the higher up you go.

Re:FPS does make a difference

[jcoiner]

Framerate - the frame bandwidth - isn't a good metric of playability for two reasons.

1. You're really interested in the latency, and latency can be much worse than 1/framerate. I used to have a first generation Rendition 3D accelerator that would do 30 fps in GLQuake, but the delay from mouse to screen was like 200ms, it sucked.
2. You want to know the worst that it ever gets, not the average. It will be worst in a rocket battle, and it speeds up after you die and respawn elsewhere. An FPS number is the average, 200 fps might be 17 fps for complex scenes and 491 fps when there's nothing happening.

Consumers use FPS to pick what 3D card they buy, and the cardmakers optimize for it. Oh well.

Re:FPS does make a difference

[Hooha Man]

Also, many games respond differently at different frame rates.

For example, in Quake1 you could swim faster with higher framerate.
In fact, all the Quake games (and games based on the Quake engine) have had features like this. The latest Q3 patch does quite a good job of fixing it.
Thanks

Bruce

Re:FPS does make a difference

[Pov]

So I've noticed. Quake III had a deal where if you were getting around 128 fps you could jump a couple of pixels higher and make some jumps that weren't otherwise possible. An interesting side feature of good frames!

Re:FPS does make a difference

[RedWizzard]

Depends on the game. If events are only handled before (or after) a frame is drawn then yes increased framerate is always a win. Visually it is impossible to see very high framerates, not just because of human visual limitations, but also because most monitors refresh less than 100 times per second.

Re:Average frame rate isn't the issue

[Fervent]

Of course, once you throw in the USB mouse, the high powered SB Live! doing surround sound, the 21" monitor, etc., your frame rate is sure to drop even more.

If I can push 30 I'm perfectly happy.

Re: Useful FPS

[atrowe]

It's just too bad we don't see the quality of games doubling every sim months to match.

um, no

[delmoi]

Actualy, a TV changes the image every time the beam passes over the screen, so motion can actualy be displayed 60 times a second. Only half of the scanlines are refreshed though. But you can still get fluid motion that way.

the "x frames per second is enough" fallacy

[inquis]

I have heard this silly argument so much that I can't stand hearing it anymore.

First of all, notice the game that this mad optimazation is being done for: Q3A. It is well known in the Q3A community that in the current version of Q3A (1.17) the physics model is frame based; that is, physics in the game world is calculated once for each frame ON EACH CLIENT. Therefore, those people that are getting 200fps are recalculating game physics 200 times a second, whereas those people only getting 30 or 60 or "72" are only getting their physics recalculated that many times per second. This is why professional Q3A players tweak their rigs to such an insane extent: you can pull off some insane moves when you get 200 frames that you can't when you only get 30. Keep this in mind when you watch someone that is really hardcore into Q3A play.

Also, this "the eye can only see 72 frames" crap needs to be debunked NOW. First, assume that you have a monitor and a vid card that support refresh rates so amazingly sillily high that no video card will ever be able to pump polys that fast (say 10,000 hz). Now, say that you are getting 72 fps. Let's say that you are running around in CS, and you start getting shot from behind. Say you pull a 180 to face your enemy in say a quarter of a second. A quick calculation will show that there are 18 frames of animation in this quarter of a second that you are turning. Therefore, a frame will be drawn each 10 degrees that you turn. Now, while this may be imperceptible at extreme range, realize that objects at close range are going to get choppy. Like, say that you were looking at a door jamb that may only be visible for 30 degrees of your field, but that is physically quite close to you. That door jamb will be rendered on three frames on your screen. It will be choppy.

If you don't understand what I am trying to get at, start up CS (providing you use Windows, of course ;) ) and go to a stage like cs_italy. Provided that you have a vid card that will push enough polys, set your fps_max to the hypothetical 72. Go to the wine cellar, that has lots of objects in a constrained area. Do a quick 360. You will notice that because your visual field is spinning so fast, each object will only be on the screen for a limited period of time, and therefore will get so few frames that it will appear choppy.

This is the choppiness that modern GFX cards and monitors will help smooth out.

So, please, all of youall, STOP spreading the "your eyes can only see X frames per second" myth. It simply is not true.

-inq

Average frame rate isn't the issue

[zlite]

It's peak frame rate that matters: i.e. the frame rate at the moment that you've got the most number of objects on the screen. Just like you don't want only enough server capacity to handle your average traffic, but instead need a lot extra to handle peak load, so frame rates above 72 ensure that you won't drop below 60 or so even in the most complex scenes.

Re:Average frame rate isn't the issue

[karnal]

From where I stand, though, it already seems like you dumped a few hundred down on video... in fact, in my opinion, you have 2 cards that are much better than my teenie v3 3000.

But...

At the recent computer show, I was going to buy a GeForce2 GTS Ultra to go with my tbird 950. Then I looked at the price tag again, and promptly put it back on the table.

I can't remember a time when top of the line video cards cost so much -- I was most estatic to get this v3 at time of release for $169. I don't think I could stand to pay 250$+ for a card right now -- plus, if it's all for games, and games aren't my game, heh, well...

back to the drawing board....

Re:Monitor refresh rate

[spinkham]

Actually, that would be 60hz.

Control Lag: The eye is only half of the equation

[Aardappel]

What people haven't mention sofar is _control lag_, which is independant from any input sampling method: the fact that if your frames stutter past you at 20 fps you have a harder time aiming, because how people aim is a kind of feedback loop between what they see and the adjustment they make with the mouse. Control lag can easily give as much or more lag in aiming than a slow connection does, I've included a very good explanation of this (taken from a messageboard that doesn't exist anymore) below.

Couple this with what other people have mentioned (primarily that MINIMUM fps is all that matters: difference between a normal timedemo and an intense fight can be as much as 5x to 10x, try getting 72fps minimum for that!) and the fact that the physics of all quake derived games are biased towards high fps, and 200 fps is actually kinda low. This is of course if you want to play "competively", if all you want is a relaxing frag for half an hour after work, 50 fps average will do you fine.

The post:

from: Menace (matthewv@best.com):

That Penstar link is interesting, but gets a lot of things wrong and misses all the most
important points.

Here goes.

Visually, the eye can distinguish between separate "flickers" at a varying rate depending on
such factors as brightness (brighter requires higher refresh rate--movies can get away with 48
flickers/sec becuase they are actually quite DIM--contrary to what that website says), field of
view (peripheral vision is more sensitive to flicker than straight-ahead vision), age of the
viewer, etc. The specific rate is known as the "critical flicker frequency."

So if you have a tiny, very dim point of light which is only slightly brighter than the
background and which just gets a little brighter and dimmer, and look at it directly, it can
flicker very slowly and still appear to be a steady point of light (you might not see the flicker
even if it's flashing at under 10Hz, or even slower), but a bright full-view image (such as a
bright strobe light in a dark room) may need to refresh at 200Hz or more to appear
completely steady and continuous.

It's less clear how much the eye/brain can integrate and distinguish motion, but my opinion is
that we CAN distinguish smoother/more detailed motion up to nearly the flicker frequency
limit. It may not always be noticeable, since often successive images differ little from the
preceeding one (which is a critical factor in motion video compression), but when the whole
image moves quickly or fast dramatic action occurs, you can see the difference.

Anyway, the 24fps (24 frames, each projected twice for 48 "flickers" per second) of film is
clearly NOT enough--I can see the lack of motion discrimination in movies quite easily,
though you tend to get used to it within the first couple of minutes. The 20-25fps range often
quoted as "all the eye can see" is really the MINIMUM limit below which most people have a
hard time fooling their brains into thinking they are seeing continuous motion, as opposed to
a series of distinct still images in succession. But that doesn't at all mean that increasing the
framerate doesn't result in dramatic improvements. The one serious effort I know of to study
this in regards to film was done by Douglas Trumbull, who concluded that 60fps was the
desirable minimum for smooth and accurate motion reproduction--and appearantly such film
looks startlingly more realistic than normal film.

HOWEVER, all this talk of "what the eye can see" blah blah blah doesn't even begin to address
the biggest problem in terms of computer games. We seem to be forgetting that instead of
just passively WATCHING our computer games, we INTERACT with them. So now you have
to think a little about what "framerate" means in these terms--if the game can render a certain
number of frames per second, that means that each frame takes a certain amount of time to
render. So from the point that the game has accepted all input, it takes that much time before
you can see it on screen. In addition, if you give input while it's in the middle of the previous
screen, it has to wait additional time until that screen is finished before it even begins on the
next one.

What this means is that there is an inverse relatoinship between framerate and what I call
"control latency." The amount of latency can be pretty shocking--at 10fps, your control latency
(the time between, say, moving the mouse and seeing the image on screen move as a result)
is actually 100-200ms! This is even wose than having a 100-200ms ping (a LOT worse) since it
effects aiming and all other client-side actions. At 25fps, the delay is 40-80ms, which is still
pretty significant. In order to keep that delay under 20ms at all times you need to have a
framerate which never drops below 100fps!

This helps explain the feeling of sudden lag that can occur during intense battles--in addition
to likely ping spikes from too much data saturating your lowly modem connection, if your
framerate plummets at the same time (which it probably will), it's quite possible you would
literaly experience a brief increase in total latency approaching a full second!

On top of this of course you have to consider the maximum possible number of angles you
can aim it in a given period of time. At 10fps, in the half second you typically have to aim,
there are only 5 possible angles you can aim at, and it will jump from one to the next, instead
of moving smoothly between them. Combined with the latency (100-200ms) this makes it
VERY difficult to aim. Compare this to 100fps where there would be 50 distinct angles to
cycle through in that half second, and only 10-20ms delay--it's MUCH easier to aim precisely,
and to make quick adjustments if necessary.

On top of all that of course is the fact that what we should be concerned with is our MINIMUM
framerates under the worst possible conditions, since the average framerate in a particular
situation is usually as much as double the minimum, and an intense situation is usually far
more demanding than your average "timedemo." (Compare bigass1.dem to Quake's built-in
demos, or crusher.dm2 to Q2's demo1.dm2 for instance, then spend some time watching
your "average" "minimum" and "maximum" numbers in Unreal Tournament with the timedemo
utility enabled. Based on the variation, take a guess what your minimum framerate in bigass1
or crusher would be, then compare that to the average reported score for demo1...) The
point being that even if all we want is a bare minimum of 30fps at all times, we may need to
get 50-100fps as the average score in a standard timedemo. And that's assuming that 30fps is
"enough," which, based on the information above, I contend is not the case--while a "casual"
gamer may not find it worthwhile to spend the money or sacrifice the visual quality for
improved framerate, there clearly IS a benefit to it. Certainly there's a limit--I doubt going
above 100fps or so does any additional good, but again, to ensure that fps ALL THE TIME
may take a timedemo score approaching 200fps...

these cards are still important

[drfalken]

If I'm not mistaken, we are still way off in the capability to render enough polygons to approximate reality well enough to fool ourselves into thinking the CG is real life. So we need these killer cards that can run our current software at crazy-ass frame rates in order to allow the next level of game designers to write games that show more polygons per second while being able to rely on there being a consumer base that can run their resource intensive games. Think about it, if Carmack had to sell QuakeIII to the same hardware base that ran QuakeI at crazy frame rates, he wouldn't have been able to make the software improvements that he did.

I have no idea whether I'm making any sense, but I hope someone understands my point.

Re:these cards are still important

[King of the World]

Sounds like you need Giddy3!

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[delmoi]

video card and processor run at a constant speed during quake games. They usualy run at a constant speed during normal opperation as well..

super fps

[dwakeman]

Remember, the reason you crank your machine for huge frame rates is so that when you are in a real crunch part of a quake battle your machine won't drop below a certain point. If 72 fps is my eyes max then I never ever want below that :) dwakeman

31 fps is fine for me.

[Bender Unit 22]

My setup goes from 71 with low action down to 31 with many players visible, which is fine for me. I still manage to be in the top 3 on most counter-strike maps(I know, it's about teamplay:-) )

I'd like a higher fps, but at this point my CPU is the bottleneck and I'd rather spend my money on something else.
--------

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[isorox]

So when I next get a first post I'll have to look up "first, 1337 and petrified" in a dictionary (of course, if I cant spell it in the first place!

No! Extreme FPS is useful even for text editing!

[leonbrooks]

Your eyes do tiny little loops and recalibrates at up to 70FPS, which is one of the many design ``tricks'' which are used to give our eyes a much higher effective resolution and framerate than the hardware (eyeballs, nerves, brain) would suggest. This is one reason why dead trees are still easier to read/recognise than video.

Using a very high framerate (150-250FPS) can work around this problem, as can using a slower phosphor. Intelligent-pixel displays will also solve the problem by remaining a stable colour until they're due to change.

I agree that the testing dude's monitor is unlikely to be doing 200FPS, but OTOH perhaps it should be doing that rate.

High FPS = Higher possible visual quality

[Heretic2]

I think people have adaquately made the point here that 150 average fps over a timedemo hopefully translates that the trough (opposite of peak?) FPS will be adaquately high (ie still above 60 FPS).

Another point to consider when people say, "Who cares if you get 150 fps?!?" is that the extra speed can be leveraged for more visual quality. Namely more texture stages (ie 4-8 textures/surface blended together) and higher polygon counts. All that extra power can be used in future games that leverage the power for better visual quality. ie More future proof cards.

I personally can't wait to see what will happen when higher order surface rendering will be moved completely onto the hardware. ie give the GPU a b-spline and watch it tesselate it in hardware.

Ryan Earl
Student of Computer Science
University of Texas

Monitor refresh rate

[vanadium4761]

Isn't the frame rate tied to the monitor refresh rate? If you are running at 200fps wouldn't you need an amazing monitor to keep from seeing the tearing of textures?

Re:Monitor refresh rate

[KernelHaxor]

Sort of. We are talking about 200 frames per second when we talk about frame rates. Even fairly weak monitors refresh at 60Mhz (thousand cycles per second). Check out http://www.d-silence.com/video/refres h.h tm for a better explanation.

You are missing the point

[theviper007]

It is true that anything over approximately 72 fps is not registered by your brain...BUT, that isn't the point.

The point to showing that your machine can handle 100+ fps on a relatively high-tech FPS like Q3 is that shows your system will be able to:

a. Handle higher resolutions/color bit depths (memory allowing)

b. Handle games that require MUCH more processing (this includes graphics, AI, gameplay, sound, etc) without much problem (unless, of course, the game is using a feature not available on your graphics card)

If the best we could do now was 72-80 fps in Q3 on a crazy overclocked high-end system, then there is a pretty big bottleneck somewhere (software or hardware) that needs to be dealt with before more complex games can be written.

Max is 78, min is 55

[Thorson]

I worked for a research and development group about 15 years ago. One of our areas of research was frame rates. We discovered that frame rates are a function of age, genetics, ambient light, and a number of other smaller effects. The highest rate we saw before fusion was 78 fps. Some don't see flicker at rates as low as 55 fps. Everyone saw flicker at 50 fps.

Re:Max is 78, min is 55

[Cuthalion]

I can see it flicker when the screen is mostly white

But when it's entirely black, it doesn't flicker at all!

Re:Max is 78, min is 55

[LMariachi]

1. Each frame is shown twice, not three times. Imax may be different.

2. "Temporal anti-aliasing?" I think you mean "motion blur," which varies with the camera's shutter angle (roughly equivalent to a still camera's exposure time), but yeah, it does smooth things out.

Re:Max is 78, min is 55

[Malc]

"As an illustration: when you watch a movie in a theater, there are 24 different images per second, but each image is displayed three times per second to yield a refresh rate of 72 Hz"

But don't movie cameras introduce temporal anti-aliasing, which would help reduce the effects of a lower framerate?

Re:I think you have put your hand on it

[KyleCordes]

I'm waving my hand in front of my screen, no flash at all.

(Of course, I use a notebook PC with active matrix LCD... I find the stable, physically unmovable nonjittering pixels much easier on the eyes than a CRT.)

please die

[delmoi]

Who cares? Its just a slashdot post. Despite what many people think, spelling is not the easiest thing in the world. Some people can be very intelegent and still make errors. I don't see why everyone needs to get their panties in a bunch. spellcheckers can spellcheck when something needs to be professional. Whats the point of going though all that work for a slashdot post?

Re:please die

[Sanchi]

My point exactaly. Thank you.

Sanchi

No point exceeding monitor refresh rate

[fishlet]

For the average person with a monitor refreshing at 75hz for example, it's kind of pointless to update frames more often than that. In fact a common television only updates it's image 30 times a second (even though the electron beam passes over the screen twice as often)- which produces an acceptably smooth animation for most purposes.

Re:No point exceeding monitor refresh rate

[Th3 D0t]

What about an uncommon television?
---

Re:No point exceeding monitor refresh rate

[atrowe]

"In fact a common television only updates it's image 30 times a second (even though the electron beam passes over the screen twice as often)"

That's true, but a television or movie screen can give the illusion of a more fluid movement than a digitally rendered image at the same framerate. The shutter speed of the camera capturing the video that you see on your television inadvertantly captures a bit of motion in each frame. What you are seeing in one frame of television is not an instantaneous moment but actually several miliseconds that the shutter was open to fully expose the film. When you are playing Q3 (or Half-Life or whatever) each frame is rendered to be one instant. This is why you need a faster refresh rate on your PC than your television.

Re:No point exceeding monitor refresh rate

[fishlet]

Do you suppose a motion blurring effect would improve the percieved image quality then (at lower frame rates). I think the latest Voodoo card has support for something like that? That being the case that you cannot have actual motion in a single frame... but evidence of motion.

Re:No point exceeding monitor refresh rate

[atrowe]

The Voodoo 4 and 5 series both offer hardware motion blur, but not many games support it yet.

But that is only the average FPS that is over 200

[Sanchi]

While on my gameing computer i average 70 FPS there are times that i drop to well below 20 during hard effects (like 5 bodies being gibbed at once). The goal of hardware tweakers is to get the maximun effects while not droping below that critical point of 60 ftp (or 72 as that article clames).

And I promise that i can tell the difference between a computer avereging 72 FPS and 200 FPS.

Sanchi

The reason why you want higher FPS in Quake III

[Lost Carrier]

Its because:

1. In close fights with many objects, your max FPS will drop alot. So having 72 FPS in a perfect condition doesnt mean it will stay there. This means higher FPS is to prefer.

2. The physics in Quake III are based on your FPS. You can't do some of the tricks with a low FPS.

Lost Carrier

Crazzy Rates...

[BobLenon]

Yes, 200 fps is crazzy. But with those 200 fps come alot of other 'features' that make it more realistic, such as T&L, foggin ect ... Surely i dont need those 200fps, but the realizm is what I really want. So give some 100 fps and really good textures, curves ect.

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[Cuthalion]

However when you are doing intensive calculations they DO use more power and dissipate more heat as more of the chip is used. "idling" at 800mHz doesn't push the chip to it's limits (unless it's a 400 mhz chip!)

go speed

[funkycat]

im personally glad for the graphics cards that are giving us crazy frame rates for 2 reasons... 1) all my games llok really good 2) i can keep my card for a long time without needing to replace it every two months when a new game that's better looking has more polys and plays ata a higher resolution comes out.

This article is a troll...

[toppk]

for carmack... (we shall see).

Seriously, the point is that 200fps will easily be burned up by greater detail (FSAA/blur/motion fx). The problem is how to turn off and on the better looks when the scene is crowded..

we shall see..

Why Quake3 needs High FPS.

[Domini]

Firstly: Quake3

The game is designed in such a manner that there is always a server and a client, even in single player mode. Quake has this little oddity (which hardcore Quake player use a lot) that allows them to achive a bit more height with certain update ferequencies. And somehow the updates are linked to certrain FPS. For instance: Begin able to just jump normally up onto the megahealth platform without any other aid on the Q3DM13 level has certain advantages. I can only do it with a FPS of 120 and 140.
With an FPS of 140 I can rocketjump higher, and with a FPS of 120 gravity seems to work a little less harder, and I can jump from the railgun to the rocket-launcher platform (and back) on Q3DM6. (Using a combination of circle-jumping and stafe-jumping techniques that exploit some other physics feature - these are so difficult to master that they were left in from previous bugs)

Thus for Quake I need a sustained 120. It is possible in Quake3 to cap the framerate at acertain value, but then you must be sure you can keep it there. Besides, there are certain jerking phenomena with my mouse with has a update frequency of 120 Hz, and my monitor with refreshes at 120 Hz if I cannot seem to keep 120 FPS in quake. (Which makes railing more inacurate)

These things are only important in competitive playing, for which Quake3 was designed.

Secondly: Other games.
Mostly similar to reasons I stated above - Mouse jitter on certain systems, as well as sustaining the same FPS on even high difficulty scenes. Most of the FPS ratings were done with certain detail off, and was only an average. You need about 150+ on average to have >80 on worst scenario.

Re:depends on the monitor, too

[TheLink]

Yep. It depends on how long the phosphors glow for. If they stay glowing for a long time, you won't notice even at 20fps. However moving stuff will be smeared all over the screen.

So if you play lots of fast action games you'll want a certain sort of monitor which supports and needs a high refresh rate to look good.

Anyway I think if the minimum FPS is about 85 then it's probably good enough. But people should leave the frame rates locked to the monitor refresh rate if not it looks really ugly- having 86 fps on an 85 fps screens means you have weird effects every second!

Have fun!

Link.

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[Cuthalion]

Texture really isn't much of an issue, considering that 64 Mb graphics cards are going to be around the corner at quite an affordable price soon

False. Particularly at high resolutions today's video cards are still fill-rate limited. It's not because they can't fit all the textures in video ram, but because they can't get that onto the video processing chip fast enough. I mean, to draw each pixel it's not unreasonable to have to do a lot of memory lookups (lightmap, 2 mipmaps, environment map, bumpmap, z-buffer (wait, is there alpha too?)) (and that's not even counting any sort of interpolation!) and often you need to draw pixels more than once.

And I don't know if you realize how FSAA (full screen antialiasing) is done, but the trick is basically: Render it real big and then scale down with nice interpolation, which doesn't affect how much polygon geometry you're doing, but does quadratically increase the number of pixels you draw.

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[Sanchi]

But I can be Vice President right?
Patatoe

Sanchi

Err... no

[Temporal]

The point is, with a faster card, you get better visual quality, be it from FSAA, multiple rendering passes, higher GeoLOD, or just higher resolution. Also, if you get 72fps on average, that might drop noticeably when you least want it to (during big firefights), which would be bad. At 200fps, your performance could take a sudden 64% hit and you wouldn't be able to see it.

------

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[Sanchi]

Well, I guess windows buckled under the pressure

Sanchi

Re:It's the *resolution* at high fps that matters

[Sanchi]

Actualy in my system, nVidia's linux drivers are 3 fps faster then 2k, dont know about 98 tho

Sanchi

We _do_ need high frame rates.

[Rostis]

You are all wrong :)

People used to say I was nuts when I bought my Geforce DDR card. All I did was to play Forsaken in 800x600 anyway, and the frame rate was the same as the refresh rate on my monitor with the old card.

The Geforce got me 300 fps in Forsaken. No, I can't SEE that many frames per second, BUT... you'll fly FASTER if the frame rate is higher. And that was important to be amongst the elite players :) This feature of Forsaken was the reason I bought the new card.

I tweaked and tweaked only to fly faster.

I don't play Forsaken today, because I found a lot of interesting games I couldn't play with the old card, d'uh :)

Do something besides optimize

[heroine]

You always wonder whether there are any more things to be done besides optimizing the frame renderer, when the programmer spends all day trying to get from 192fps to 193fps.

Substained Framerate

[E1ven]

I realize someone will say this sooner or later, but the reason to have huge framerates through parts of levels, is to have substained frame rates that are over the 72 fps.
When you go into a High Action area, such as having 200 creatures in room, all throwing off 5 rockets, the computer has a lot more work to do.
If the game usually runs at 75 fps, there is going to be a visable drop.
Let's say that the scene causes a 50 frame drop. If your 3d card were maxing out before, doing 75 fps, it will now drop visably (75-50 = 25fps), but if you have a margin, you will be safe for more scenerios (200-50=150. 150 is still safely over the threshhold)
--

This message brought to you by Colin Davis

You are right it's not real

[BlackHat]

As most games the clock is not async, I doubt every object was updated by 1/200th of T and all polys resubmited 200 times a sec. More likely is 140 "No change frames" and 60 or so actual updates.
TMOICBW.

Re:Truly perfect measure of FPS

[dat00ket]

Simple. Just use a completely white screen and a completely black screen and then flip between the two a number of times per second. As anyone who's tested this will tell you, you will be able to tell 85Hz from 100Hz, at least if you have a decent monitor with reasonably fast phosphors. And the the thing about movies at 24fps being fast enough, that's just bunk. It's nowhere near fast enough (except for chick-flicks). People just think it is because they have never seen anything higher. If you watch real 50fps film you will notice the difference. Hopefully some big-shot movie guy *cough*George Lucas*cough* will realize this and start shooting at higher framerates. Since we're bound to shift to digital cameras and projectors soon, higher frame rates would be one of my top priorities. Besides, it'd greatly increase the odds of finding freeze-frame nudity on DVDs.

Re:FPS does make a difference (quantum effects)

[Stephen Samuel]

That's probably because it does more positional calculations (once for each frame). If the frame doesn't 'catch' you at the very top of the parabola, it looks like you didn't jump quite as high.

I remember dealing with this in a moon lander program for Radio-Shack Model I. The original version did a non-realtime cycle of 1 "frame" per second. I found it annoying that you could be 3 feet up dropping 50FPS, and then, after a heavy burn, be 10 feet up climbing at 80FPS. I resolved the problem by calculating lower bound of the curve to see if you touched the ground. If you touched the ground, I'd calculate your speed at touchdown time to decide whether or not you cratered.

Later on, I did a realtime version -- peek commands for keyboard scan codes and input editing routines. I think I got it up to about 5 FPS. At the time, that was considered pretty hot.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[g_mcbay]

Moderate this up! Hardly anyone (with a clue) argues that they need a constant 200 FPS. The reason you want a base of a couple hundred FPS is so that you're (hopefully) above 72 FPS (or whatever lower number you think is minimal detectable) when there's 25 other guys on the screen all hurling rockets left & right.

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[balthan]

Clock speed is constant, yes, but that doesn't mean that the load is constant. My thunderbird runs considerably hotter under a full load than sitting idle. Surfing and reading email will hardly tax a processor or vid card at all, whereas something like Q3 (I prefer UT myself) will leave them gasping for air.

Ahhh...

[B00yah]

The good old days, where the fps was totally not needed, because the characters didn't move that fast anyway, (Rise of The Triad), or even better, the old bbs games...

Re:Ahhh...

[Anonymous Coward]

LOOK WEST

You see a beautiful field, stretching to the top of a distant hill. Strawberry plants are scattered throughout.

This is one hell of a stupid article

[Ergo2000]

This is absolutely absurd. I remember when I was young and loved my Atari ST. One of the big selling points was that is a special, slideshot mode the machine could display 512 colours simultaneously. At the same time the Amiga could, in HAM mode, display 4096 colours. I remember questioning advocates though when they claimed that 512 colours was "more than the eye can see!". I've read the same thing now about 16-bit colour, then 24-bit colour, yet strangely many graphic artists insist upon 32-bit colour because of differentiations. I guess the human race is just evolving really quickly!

The same thing has happened with sound as well with people continually advocating that XYZ is "better than the ear can hear!" (i.e. the absurd MP3 argument that 128Kbps is better than the ear can hear : To put it simply -> Bullshit. Yet it's amazing hearing people telling us that).

A simple proof that this article is bogus is the fact that it claims that you 72 Hz is the optimum refresh rate. Hardly. On short persistence monitors 85Hz is barely adequate, and I guarantee that if presented with the various options I could easily tell the difference. Yet more importantly is the fact that computer images are instantaneous images, and multiple images in one eye "cycle" can lead to the blur which gives a massive amount of information : 190 images per second GUARANTEED looks different than 85 images per second. However getting to the fundamental of the argument, the reason that you want "200fps!" in Q3 or whathaveyou is that that is a best case or average frame rate, and the hope is that by getting such a frame rate it won't bog down when the rockets are flying and enemies are abound.

Well I've gone every which direction, but sorry this article seems like someone trying to justify why everyone else are idiots to get their GeForce II GTS 64MB while they lolly along with their ATI Rage. Blah.

You misunderstand that quote

[Neurotrash]

The author isn't getting the model confused with the display. The argument against motion blur is that players would not know where to aim their weapons, because what they see would not match what is "really" (within the pseudoreality of the game, that is) happening.

30fps

[trolebus]

More is nice (I always aim for around 50) but once you get abouve 30fps the movement appears smooth to your eyes. BTW - cartoons are only 24 fps. The only advantage to more frames (once you hit 32bit color 1024x728) is that when you get a lot of characters in the frame (happens once or twice) you won't drop down to around 25 fps for a second. This momentary drop is beyond insignifigant and happens so rarely that you can ignore it.

Re:30fps

[Osty]

That's bull. Yes, movies are 24fps, and NTSC video is 30fps (interleaved, for an effective 60Hz), and PAL video is 25fps. But it's very naive to just look at the numbers. What you're missing is important things like motion blur, which go a long way towards making motions seem smooth.

However, at 24fps and *with* motion blurring, movies still have a hell of a time doing a comfortable pan. Seriously, try paying attention next time you go to a movie. You'll never see a long pan, or if you do, you'll notice quite quickly that it's rather painful to watch.

Now, here's the kicker -- Most video games don't do any form of motion blur at all (some do a minor amount, like Homeworld, but the overhead neccessary to generate motion blur is generally more than it would be to just pump up the frame rate). So, without motion blur, the human eye needs a minimum of 24fps to see passably acceptable motion. However, that motion only really becomes comfortable around 60fps, or so.

As to the insignifigance of a sub-30fps drop, I urge you to actually play a game such as Quake3, where on-screen complexity and number of moving objects can get to large levels (play on a huge deathmatch map, with lots of players). You'll certainly notice that sudden drop in fps as you're aiming your railgun.

People have been blowing the "The eye can only see 24fps" bull for years. It's about time someone set them straight, even if it's only to say, "Oh, wait. It's not 24fps the eye can see. It's 72fps. Yeah, that's it." Of course, down the road, that'll change to, "Wait, it's not 72fps, but 100fps," and then "Wait, not 100fps, but 200fps," and so on. Seems to me the only reason for this is to make people not feel so bad about not having the latest and greatest video card out there.

There's more than Quake

[dpm]

C'mon, people -- I didn't buy my 3D card to play Quake. There are other 3D applications, such as flight simulators, where you can see dozens of miles in every direction: the better performance means that people can add a lot more detail (buildings, roads, rivers, railroads, towers, powerlines, etc.) and still keep things above 30fps.

Max FPS = screen refresh rate

[(void *)0x00000000UL]

I don't see why you need 200 FPS if the monitor is refreshing itself 85 times per secondes... 200 fps is so fast that some frame won't even make it on the screen

Re:Max FPS = screen refresh rate

[Rostis]

Take a look at my post about why we need higher frame rates. To play forsaken :)

Higher frame rate makes you fly faster.

Why we need the hardware speed anyway .. and ..

[BeanThere]

Sure, you don't need 200 fps in a game .. but that doesn't exactly imply that nVidia is wasting their time improving their chipsets .. if you Mr Carmack can get Quake3Arena to render at 200fps, then he can take some of those "excess" frames and use that time to make the visuals of his next engine look that much nicer, since you at 200 fps, you can render a second pass of effects, and drop to 100 fps.

What many people here probably aren't aware of is that a lot of Quake3 players bumped their frame rate up to 120 *not* because they thought the higher frame rate itself gave them an edge, but because up until the most recent Q3A patch, there was a bug in the quake physics engine that allowed you to jump just a little higher at 120 fps than at others (a big plus in q3dm13 for the megahealth ..)

A bit of "tragic" irony on Carmack's part here - if you've watched the "pro" Quake players play, you'll notice that they set their graphics settings horribly low, to the point where the graphics really looks crap. For various reasons this gives you advantages (not just the speed, but a high r_picmip lets you, for example, see more clearly through the plasma gun textures.) So while Carmack is working his life away at making the stuff look as good at possible, the hardcore gamers end up playing the game so it looks like crap anyway .. :)

Something else that some people don't know about, is that if they buy a souped up PC, and install Windows98 and Quake3Arena, the default mouse rate on the PS/2 port is 40 Hz, and if mouse smoothing in Quake is off, even when you're rendering at 90 fps, you won't see it, because your view will be tied to the 40Hz mouse update rate (you can get utils like ps2rate to set this rate) but in any case, I can imagine that at least some people may walk away thinking that that is how 90 fps actually looks, and that they can't tell the difference between 40 and 90.

Something else that may be worth mentioning, in my experience programming 3d networked simulations, depending on how the network code is structured, a slightly lower frame rate may improve the network performance, as limitting the frame rate can give a bit of CPU idle for network threads and improve latency. Depending on the design of the network code, this can be noticeable. Not sure about Quake in this regard ..

72 fps decaffeinated maybe

[smnolde]

I usually require > 150 fps if I'm on a heavy duty, super caffeinated drink. Everything else looks like I'm on 'ludes, or something.

Re:Attention trolls

[Th3 D0t]

I find that proper trolling on average nets karma. In fact I have 46 karma from primarily trolling. I would have more except for the cap at 50 keeps losing points when I'm on a positive streak.
---

Been debunked before.

[DeeKayWon]

You, with a card that does 60 fps now will have to upgrade when the next gen of games does only 20 on your vid card. I, with my 200fps card will enjoy the next gen at 60fps just fine, thank you.

Re:Control is also a factor

[LSD-OBS]

OK so this is a day late and it will never be read or moderated but here goes anyway... Any realtime user-input orientated application would be a very amateurish production if it's control mechanism were dependant upon the output mechanism. Think back to the original BASIC nibbles games we used to play on our XT's. Sorry, but for many years now games have been running "interrupt" driven control mechanisms and CPU-speed-limited output mechanisms. This would mean, for example, that exactly as the user presses, say, FIRE, that keypress event is inserted into an event queue with an exact timestamp (frame independant). Upon the next frame/physics engine update, the time difference between the event timestamp and the exact time at the beginning of the frame/physics processing, would be used to accurately "predict" where the rocket (for instance) should be, taking into account player movement and direction changes, etc. So FPS *should* be irrelevant to the physics and control of a game. However, a human interacts with something like a game using realtime input/feedback, meaning that you constantly recalibrate your movements and keypresses in the game based on the current display output. This is where higher FPS will give you an edge - you get to see your movement/change faster, and therefore you calibrate sooner, becoming more accurate, and this, linked with a fast enough refresh to give your visual cortex the illusion of fluid motion, is what makes a game feel "smooth". The simplest example I can think of regarding this, would be moving your mouse cursor in your GUI. A hint for Q3A players: Get your monitor running at the highest frequency it can in the resolution you choose - say, 85Hz for example - and then add a few to that number and set the maximum displayed FPS to that figure, by using the "\com_maxfps" command, eg, "\com_maxfps 88". And to do a bit more knit-picking, the linked article refers to "purple" as being a combination of "red" and "blue". This is untrue - every colour possible is only a combination of a unique light-wave frequency and intensity, meaning that all intensities of the colour "purple" have the same unique light frequency. However, the three types of cones in the human eye (each responding to stimuli from different wavelength-/frequency-ranges) interpret things slightly differently. A colour like purple will stimulate the "red-range" and "blue-range" cones about equally, and therefore an RGB display consisting of equal red and blue signals, with no green, will stimulate the same cones in the same way, thus giving the illusion of the colour purple.

the real important factors

[pezpunk]

FPS is nice. having totally fluid motion, yeah, it's great and it's important. but high quality full-screen anti-aliasing is really what can make a video card stand out. even though they are totally 0wN3d by the GeForce series in virtually every other category, the Voodoos still have greatly superior FSAA. you can set the Voodoo to a lower resolution .. say 1024x768 or even 800x600 and the FSAA makes it look as good or better than a GeForce at significantly higher resolutions. having said that, though, i still say the GFs are easily the better cards, as the Voodoos are just falling too far behind in pure horsepower.

pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,

Well NO SHIT

[Erik Fish]

It seems obvious to me that you don't buy a high-end video card because you need to run TODAY'S games at 300fps or because you need to run YESTERDAY'S games at 300,000fps -- you buy such a monstrosity so that you can run TOMMOROW'S games at 72fps!!

None of today's games even utilize all the features my GeForce2 has but I bought it when it was fairly new so that it would "last" longer.

That's not the point!

[evanbd]

The point is that games like Q3A and UT make great CPU/bandwidth benchmarks at low res. look at Tom's Hardware. He uses 640x480 as a CPU benchmark, and then ignores anything below at least 800x600 or higher when looking at graphics. He has a great article a while back (I don't remember the link. sorry) explaining exactly that. Also, if the card/CPU manufacturers give more speed, then that lets the game developers add better physics/AI and more complex graphics. Anyway, no one had mentioned this yet, thought I might.

Better Yet...

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

You are under attack!

Ugly Old Hag surprises you!

She hits you for 3 damage by being ugly


With apologies to Seth Able

Moniter

[UberLame]

If nothing else, moniters don't have refresh rates much above 90hz, so higher frame rates are wasted. What I want is effects like motion blur and depth of focus. 3dfx offers these, but no games support it.

Average or minimum?

[Len]

When people talk about getting 200 fps in say Quake III, are they talking about an average of 200 fps in some timing demo? If so, bear in mind that in particular situations (large complex room, lots of other characters running around and shooting) the frame rate will drop much lower. So 200 fps average may ensure the frame rate stays about 60 or so almost all the time.
--

Uhm...

[Vegeta99]

The article doesn't debunk it. It supports it.

While we still may be several years away from photographic quality in 3D accelerators, it is important to keep the speed up there. Looks like 3dfx isn't so full of it.

Read up before you post, Tim.

Re: Useful FPS

[tzanger]

I saw somewhere (maybe /.?) that graphics card technology was improving at a rate of Moore's Law cubed... doubling performance roughly every 6 months instead of every 18 months...

umm... I'm not a math genius but 18 is not equal to 6^3.

Graphics density

[Virtex]

If I have a card capable of rendering games at 200 FPS, what that says to me is that it could render a scene 4 times as complex and still maintain an acceptable frame rate of 50 FPS (of course, things aren't always so linear in 3D graphics, but you get the point). When such cards become commonplace, it will mean gamemakers will be able to create worlds with much a much deeper level of realism in terms of visual effects, turning those excessive frame rates into something useful.

--

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[Fred Ferrigno]

So, why is the common practice to quote the maximum framerate and not the minimum framerate?

Because it's nearly impossible to measure the minimum framerate in many games, we assume that a card or system that has a higher average FPS will have a higher minimum FPS in gameplay conditions. This point is debatable, but not illogical.

Why are "timedemo" tests usually lightweight compared to actual gameplay?

We can't compare actual gamplay FPS taken from different sources, so a standard demo is used to consistent basis for comparison. As above, it isn't likely to truly represent gameplay, but the contrast between two cards or systems is likely to be the same.

In a busy situation, both will likely take the same performance hit, and the one with the higher average FPS will probably still be on the top.

--

Re:Why "Anne Marie" is really Signal 11

[Ratteau]

Actually, your example #3 IS funny...

Besides, I didnt see her/him post on this topic. So is your strategy to wait for a new story so you can post this and get it moderated up? Theres no way you researched and wrote all that out in the minute and a half since the story went up.

75 flickers, 70 hurts, 60 is painful

[Fred Ferrigno]

I'm epileptic so that is probably the cause, but I can differentiate between 75hz and 85hz. 85hz looks continuous, and 70hz or below hurts my eyes and will give me a headache after extended use. 60hz REALLY hurts; if I look at it for anything more than a few seconds and I'll get a bad headache.

Florescent bulbs, too, are a problem, but rarely. Usually they come in pairs like was mentioned and don't bother me. On the other hand I can spot a bulb that's about to break a mile away (they start to flicker more rapidly). I was recently at a fair and realized for the first time that even normal store bought strobe lights are a problem (they were a part of a ride).

--

Re:Not true for Quake 3, at least

[Fred Ferrigno]

Running sideways is pretty god damned hard. You can do it, but you really have to practice at it without tripping over yourself or turning around in the process.

Despite that, I don't think a game like Quake needs to be realistic. In fact, I like Quake because it isn't truly realistic. Do people bitch that Tetris isn't realistic? Why should Quake be any different?

I'm a little confused by the current rash of realism-based games like SOF or CS. The "realism" seems quite arbitrary and independent of its effect on gameplay. You have a gun that takes five seconds to reload, but you conviently forget the fact that you can't really reload a gun while dodging bullets, switching weapons and running for cover. Real SWAT people spend months training for fifteen seconds of action and don't particularly find it fun.

--

Use for high frame rates?

[khaladan]

With a lot of frames, one could interpolate between them to create a slightly blurry effect not unlike motion blur.

Re:Use for high frame rates?

[DirkGently]

Not by what the author has to say. Given his data, your brain will make its own motion blur when the frame rate exceeds 72fps.

Not true for Quake 3, at least

[shinji1911]

It's a known fact that most "super-jumps" (questionable physics be damned) in Quake3 cannot be made with anything less than 125 frame or so.

Jump from the rail over on DM6, the swing jump to get the health in the middle of Tourney 4, etc, cannot be done with lower framerates.

Granted, this has nothing to do with perception, but gameplay is also kinda important.

Re:Not true for Quake 3, at least

[evilned]

this is one of my beefs with quake 3, that the physics of a game depend on framerate. I remember reading that the 1.25 first beta fixed this, but the old physics code was put back in the latest beta. oh well. People will bitch no matter what. People whined when id said they were taking out the damage through walls. Of course I bitch about the stupidity of strafe jumping, so I am one of those that will be bitching about id no matter what.

Re:Not true for Quake 3, at least

[Sludge]

In case anyone was wondering, this happens because Quake 3 uses a virtual machine by default for a large portion of the code on x86 and Motorla. This occurs because of a bug in the VM where a float is rounded up, instead of chopped off, like is supposed to happen when you typecast (float).

This does not happen when you use the hard compiled DLLs, obviously. Also, you do not need a high framerate in order to exploit this bug. Rather, there are framerate points where it is exploitable. 37 frames per second is one point.

Michael Labbe

Framerates and the Verticle Refresh Rate

[_xeno_]

There is never, ever any need to try and push your framerate above the verticle refresh rate of your monitor. Since my monitor peaks out around 120 Hz (or 120 frames per second) someone running a game at 200 FPS (or 200 Hz) would be dropping frames, since the monitor can't keep up.

Most games use this to their advantage, so that when I play Half-Life, my frame rates never go above 72 FPS since my refresh rate is around 72 Hz - this is used to prevent "tearing" when one frame is rendered during the first half of the sweep to refresh the screen and another is rendered later. Going above your refresh rate will actually make your game look worse.

Even if the card is capable of 200fps, it should never actually do that - unless you have a rediculously fast refreshing monitor, you're just drawing frames that you won't see or that will simply tear. Plus, I believe that it's been stated that the human eye cannot discern framerates above about 60FPS anyway. Although it is quite nice to be able to play Half-Life at 1280x960 at a constant 72fps (again, locked to 72fps since anything higher would tear on my display).

wildly inaccurate framerate counters

[juzam]

when i was toying around with spriteworld (a mac animation library) on my g4, it kept giving me estimates like 1000 frames a sec (yowza!)... not sure what i get for quake3 though.

Today's State of Gaming

[Enonu]

I remember when I first bought my Diamond Viper 550 TNT card. Then, it could run almost any game at the time at a silly frame rate. 640x480 was "hi-res", and it was also sufficient for most games.

Now, I still have the Viper, and it does a respectable job for what I need it to do. What I'm trying to get at here is that I may have not needed the FPS the Viper could produce yesterday, but it has more than paid for itself by still being useful today. I'd like to also note that in that same time span, I've changed CPUs twice, motherboards twice, added memory and hard drive space, and replaced my sound card.

Second, when has anybody cared about getting 200 FPS? All gamers I know bump up the resolution until they notice that the framerate is affecting their gameplay. This may until it's something as low as 30 or as high as 100, but it's different for each person. Who gives a rats ass about how our cones and rods behave as long as I'm still able to frag you?

Re:Today's State of Gaming

[Utah2]

It's all about the eye candy, Enonu. The fact that your V550 still works says nothing about it's performance. I'll sell you a trident ISA video card that still works. You could bump the res down to 512X512 grayscale like someone else suggested was all that was necessary.

Not necessarily true

[Borealis]

For one thing, I can perceive flicker at up to 80 Hz, as can a few other people I know. This is why I have to run at a res/refresh that allows at least 85 Hz refresh. I would imagine that there are probably people out there than can perceive up to 100Hz.

Further, as others have mentioned, average frame rates are relatively irrelevant compared to framerates while rendering complex scenarios.

Also frame rates with *existing* games are often tweaked by handling the number of polygons on screen at a time. Dynamic T&L engines can place further strain. So even if Q3 could get 200 FPS on a highly complex screen (as opposed to an average scene), the only thing that means is that it's time to build more complex scenes.

At some point we'll have photorealistic engines at 200 fps for the most complex scene imaginable, but that day is far in the future.

Re:Not necessarily true

[UnknownSoldier]

For one thing, I can perceive flicker at up to 80 Hz, as can a few other people I know. This is why I have to run at a res/refresh that allows at least 85 Hz refresh. I would imagine that there are probably people out there than can perceive up to 100Hz.

Yeah, I set my monitor refresh to 100 Hz. as well, since anything less, and I get a head-ache.

When I get home, I'll post the info on to change the default nVidia install so that it allways runs at 100 Hz in the lower resolutions, since the stupid Windows control panel will keep resetting it to the slowest Hz when you change resolutions.

Re:30 FPS .. not even the issue

[pezpunk]

well i don't know much, but i do know i can EASILY tel lthe difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS. and anyways, this ISN"T EVEN THE ISSUE. i take offense at /. DEBUNKING the 200 FPS thing. us video card geeks are not idiots. we KNOW there's no practical purpose to overclicking our GeForce2 GTS's and squeezing out 100 or so more 3DMarks. it's a HOBBY. it's an obsession. it's a penis size thing. leave us alone.

pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[Sanchi]

I remember at the lan party, after that massive gib, 2 computers hard locked. Damn glad i was running Linux :)

Sanchi

worst experimental procedure ever

[MadPhatTim]

From the article: "Contrary to the belief that we cannot distinguish anything over 30 fps, we can actually see and recognize speeds up to 70+ fps. How can you test this? You can quickly do this with your monitor at home. Set the refresh rate to 60 Hz and stare at it for a while. You can actually see the refreshes and it is very tiring to your eyes. Now if we couldn't see more than 30 fps, why is it that flicker free is considered to be 72 Hz (refreshes per second)."

The reason you notice flickers at 60 Hz is most likely because the lights around you are also running at 60 Hz. The monitor refreshes will happen at very nearly the same time as the room light refresh, so you will see (or somehow be aware of) the blanks in between. This phenomenon is widespread. For example, machine shops can't have fluorescent lights because any tools spinning at 60 Hz will appear to be standing still (leading to all kinds of nasty accidents). If you had a dark room and a strobe light that you could set to 72 Hz, I'll bet you'd notice the flicker on a monitor refreshing at 72 Hz.

I'm not sure what the eye's "maximum refresh rate" might be, but I know this is a stupid way to measure it. They should at least do it outside in full sunshine.
---

I don't know about the rest of you...

[Burning1]

...but it seems to me that until we can render 75FPS at 1600x1200 in the latest games, using the most demanding rendering options we will never have an overly powerful system.

Who here runs games at anything less than 1024x760? What about full screen Anti Aliasing?

I can guarantee that quake3 will crush even the most powerful machines if you try to play at 1600x1200x32 bit color, with highly detailed textures, etc. etc.

Even more so, with FSAA most games are only playable at a maximum resolution of 1024x760 on most modern video cards.

Even then all of this is assumes that games are NOT getting more complex.

Listen, I'll consider the point when I can get Pixar quality gaming at a resolution of 2048x1536x32, with FSAA and still break that 75FPS limit, and not a minute before.

Motion Picture frame rate is only 24 fps!

[pkj]

Granted, the 24 fps used in the cinema does show signs of jerkiness during action scenes, but most people are surprised to know *just* how slow film still is.

There is never a need to go beyond 75 fps for video because this is the refresh rate for most monitors above 1024x768. Pushing more than that, you will have frames that are rendered, but the scan gun will never pick up the pixels!

Of course, what *really* matters is sustained frame rate under scenes of high complexity, but as long as you can always manage 60-75 fps you'll never see the difference.

-p.

Re:Motion Picture frame rate is only 24 fps!

[Camhorn]

But each frame is flashed twice, giving a pseudo-48 framerate, which helps enormously.

Motion Blur vs High frame rates

[wa1hco]

The author discussed motion blur in the real world and that the eye was designed for the real world. But didn't discuss computer generated imagery, which doesn't generally have motion blur (yet), and the benefits of high update rate. The eye, retina, visual cortex system has extensive special purpose motion processing systems, only poorly understood so far. The eye system is highly optimized for processing motion and using the blur on the retina as part of the interpretation of motion.

On the other hand, many display devices generate pulses of light that do not create blur on the retina under motion, either object motion or head/eye motion. This pulsed train impressed on the retina fools the eye system motion sensors.

The most common way to see this is to look at an LED clock or other LED display in a dim room. Ever notice that as you move your head, the display appears to swim in space? That's because the pulses of light from the scanned LED's create a sequence of still images on the retina while the surround creates a continuous blurred images. The two scenes get processed for motion differently and so appear to swim with respect to each other. This same effect occurs with CRT's in similar conditions.

Increase the refresh rate, and the pulsed light images get closer together and better approximate motion blur.

Note that this effect has nothing to do with flicker sensitivity or flicker fusion frequency.

I have no idea how Quake performance differs between 70 and 200 Hz refresh but I can see that it might.

Re: Useful FPS

[Torqued]

I saw somewhere (maybe /.?) that graphics card technology was improving at a rate of Moore's Law cubed... doubling performance roughly every 6 months instead of every 18 months... Looks to me like we're starting to see the beginning of the limits of "useful FPS". Since it looks like the "Usefeul FPS" dragon will be slain soon.. then what? What I'm really hoping we'll see in the next few years is some viable consumer grade VR applications and hardware. The companies are starting to produce some mainstream graphics cards that have some serious horsepower... the kind of horsepower that will be needed to drive stereoscopic HMD's...

Re:200FPS? geesh

[Burning1]

Well, for one thing movies use a technique known as blurring to mask lower framerates. To employ this on a gaming machine, you will most likely be forced to render the same frame a number of times (such as with 3DFX's T-Buffer) and then meld them together, or use some form of morphing algorithm (which will most likely slow things down further.)

Obviously neither of those are good answers for slower computers: In order to mask a slow framerate useing these techniques, you will be forced to do 4X the work, resulting in a very poor gaming experience. (Wow! 1.75FPS AND blurry!)

As for your system, if you haven't done so already, reduce your resolution and detail settings. At 7FPS you are asking far to much of your computer.

Barring that, Voodoo3s and Pentium III 500s are cheap now. Consider upgrading.

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[Sanchi]

So what is my spelling sucks, its not a requirement(sp) to get by in this world is it?

Sanchi

Your monitor

[unicaller]

Your monitor refresh IS the highest FPS you can get anyway. Anyone that says they can see the diffrence in anything above that is just yanking your chain.

What 200+ FPS Is Good For.

[istartedi]

Of course the human eye has limits, but that's not what 200+ FPS is for. The more frames, the faster you can do fake radiosity, environment mapping, and other effects that involve multiple frames composited to form the final image.

I would like to see 307200 FPS so we can run a separate pipeline for each pixel on a 640*480 screen. Oh... and I'd like the card that does that to be so cheap that when it burns out you just run down to the drugstore and get one for $1.98. It'll happen eventually.

Eenie meenie miney moe
Stupid voters have to go.
Inca dinca dinca do
I can do it, why can't you?

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[revscat]

So what is my spelling sucks, its not a requirement(sp) to get by in this world is it?

No, it's not a requirement. But if you want people to take you seriously (which I assume you do, otherwise you wouldn't post) then it helps to have good writing skills. The only thing that comes out of bad spelling is a loss of respect and credibility.

- Rev.

You're missing the point.

[bswick]

You're card runs Q3 at 200fps now? Great! You won't have to get a new one when Doom 3 or the next generation of game comes out and runs at 30-40fps on your TNT4.

What kind of pitiful state would hardware be in these days if we were only designing hardware to tackle today's software needs?

Re:What is wrong with 200FPS

[Dr_Bones]

Don't you think you've given up something rather important (good eyesight) for something fleeting (today's Hot Game)?? I hate to pass judgement on your values, but I did it anyway. :)

your really Signal 11 too!

[Dante]

My guess is your having fun with the idea;
your realy the same person, all the reasons
that you use as examples apply to you.

Truly perfect measure of FPS

[Dr_FunFrock]

To get a truly perfect measure of FPS wouldn't you need a test that changes *every* pixel on the screen every frame! Otherwise when talking about FPS you would need some point of reference.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Frame rates

[Animats]

In terms of the human visual system, the maximum perceivable frame rate is somewhere between 60 and 100 FPS, depending on the viewer The research done when Showscan was developed established this. Showscan settled on 60FPS; IMAX uses 48FPS or sometimes even 96FPS. The effect is striking on a big screen; the annoying 24FPS strobing during pans of standard film disappears. That's the goal to shoot for.

But above 100FPS, it just doesn't matter. Besides, you're limited by monitor sweep rate and phosphor decay rate.

Yes, there is a need, penis size

[nekros]

200 FPS? Of course you don't need that. 400 Horse power car? Of course you dont need that. 1 Ghz Computer? Of course you dont need that. So why do we still strive to get it? 2 words, Penis Size. It is a macho guy thing, i can tell you that if some guy got 200 FPS in Quake 3 i would envy him, plain and simple. He bought the hardware and along with it the bragging rights. He has a powerful machine that is in glorious excess. Hail gorious FPS excess!

BTW: I have a 900 Mhz Athlon, Geforce 2 GTS and I get 112 FPS in Quake III :P

Nekros.2y.net

Control is also a factor

[Naught_Me]

When your video card is drawing 200fps, it is also getting input 200 times a second, so your control is much smoother and more accurate.

only one of a number of limiting factors

[thex23]

Ok, so everyone thinks that mega-frames per second is good. Is this a debate?

The real issue is not how many frames per second a particular piece of hardware can cough up for a particular situation in a particular game.

Like the audio world, where every idiot thinks that a 250W amp actually delivers all of those 250 Watts all the time, this is a case of best-possible performance given an ideal situation.

There are lots of metrics you can throw at people to market your piece of technology, but in the end the metrics are only a guide. The real important thing is how it FEELS. An excellent 250W amp is still better than an ok 300W amp. A card that produces quality graphic output in real-world situations (talking about gaming here... so that's probably not the best term) is better than one that kicks ass on training wheels.

Like the article says: the purpose of a high frame rate is not to make it LOOK better, but to fool your head into seeing the game world as a real part of your environment. Basically, this is a Wetware hack on "suspension of disbelief".

Of course, we'll have to build games that are worthy of this kind of "reality". For me, first-person shooters aren't it.

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[Sanchi]

Im not going to argue that, and on all profesional(sp) items I will check the spelling on, but im not about to cut and paste into a word processer just to post something.

Sanchi

It does matter... sometimes..

[edmz]

..specially in Quake3 v1.17 and prior, your speed
and jump height were affected directly by your cpu
speed, so people with better/faster boxes could
pull tricks people with old boxes couldnt.

This is why a lot of quake3 players want to
squeeze the last fps out of their box. They know
it wont look cooler (heck, does guys dont care
about aesthetics, they have every graphic option
turned off) but it will help them make the dm6
rail to bridge jump :P

I think this is fixed in the latest patch.

History repeats itself...

[funkapus]

I remember seeing flamewars back in early 1997 about how it was pointless to run at more than 30 FPS because that was "all the human eye can perceive". There were even some people saying that 24 FPS being the maximum reasonable rate since projected film runs at that framerate.

I can't really see how you'd want something higher than a constant 85 Hz, but who knows. Don't forget that game response depends on the framerate as well, and someone running at 100 may conceivably get a crucial advantage over someone running at 85, just because their twitch reactions are 1.7 ms faster.

All I can say is that tastes are constantly refined, and the bar is constantly raised. I'm sure that before stereo sound, no one could conceive of anything better than mono, and the same with the advent of surround, 5.1 surround, etc. So the assertion that we don't need to improve things any further is ludicrous, because we simply don't have the knowledge of how much better things could be.

Of course, this type of thinking is what keeps the marketroids fed... :)

depends on the monitor, too

[Alien54]

well, I know that even on a regular screen, *depending on the monitor*, I can tell the differance between 72 fps and 90 fps or so...

after that, it is all sort of gravy, depending on the other bells and whistles and effects and such....

seriously, even for regular applications, some monitors look worse at "standard frame rates" compared to others....

not that it matters *that* much ...[smile]

today's overkill is tomorrow's garbage

[ttyRazor]

the argument for higher framerates isn't to actually get imperceltibly faster graphics, but to give room for the really slow scenes. if the lowest your framerate dips to is ~70 fps, then you will be getting a much more consistent experience than if everything drops down to ~15 fps every time the action heats up. It also gives room for the Carmacks of the world to do even more stuff in future titles.

You do need 200 FPS and here is why

[Matt Ownby]

It always amuses/irritates me when non-gamers publish "studies" to show that hardcore gamers don't need ultra high frame rates. My response is, perhaps that is the reason why the hardcore gamers are beating the non-gamers.
I used to be a pretty serious Quake2/Quake3 player. I won a local Quake2 tournament with over 120 contestants. And I can tell you right now that 72 FPS is not the maximum framerate that the the human eye can detect. Higher framerate translates into much PRECISION and CONTROL and that is why the more FPS you have, the more advantage you have. You've got to be able to aim extremely quickly, usually by flicking your wrist. These wrist flicks can turn as much as 90 to even 180 degrees. I haven't done the math, but I'm guessing that 72 FPS isn't going to cut it when making a 180 degree turn in a split second.
These people kill me. "Well, no one should need over 72 FPS and BTW I always lose at Quake 3."

They should interview some of the top gamers in the world such as Fatality or Makaveli and ask them their thoughts on the importance of high framerate.

Frame Rendering and Game Cycles

[LionKimbro]

60/72 Hz is what we want when we play games, but you generally have to target above that for when your potentially viewable set (PVS) changes dramatically- if you move *really* fast (missile cam), say, or if you just turn your head 90 degrees (and look down a completely different hallway).

A current trend in games is to seperate the rendering cycle from the simulation cycle.

Historically, games have been implemented with a read-eval-print loop like this:

1. read user input for a given cycle
2. evaluate what happens next
3. display the result

Now, we (FPS, 3D) seem to be moving towards the parallelization of read/eval (simulation) cycles and the print (display) cycles. That way they can be controlled independently: The display can be given just the cycles it needs to provide 60/72Hz, and simulation lives in it's own space. The display routines have their own prediction mechanisms to make sure that they can keep pace.

It's the *resolution* at high fps that matters

[Argyle]

The real benefit of having a speedy cpu/video card is the ability to run the games at a high resolution with all the effects turned on maximum.

Playing at 640x480 with 200 fps, but all the effects turned down/off is suxxor.

At 1280x1024 and high quality textures and effects, the games are smooth as movies at 60 fps. If your box can run this way, you don't need to run at 200 fps at 640x480. A great looking smooth picture is much better than a stripped down image.

The only problem I have is that the Windows nVidia drivers are still better than the Linux nVidia drivers.
-----

It's essential these cards can do 150-200+ fps

[Xuranova]

Under optimal conditions these cards can do 150-200+ fps then when things get a little cpu intensive it will only drop to 80-90, still a comfort zone. If they listened to all these scientsist who really need to not worry about us, and made their cards concentrate on the 72-75 fps mark, the moment things get cpu heavy, we drop to 30 then we get mad and kick the machine. Xcess power and speed is needed to insure a playable game. And for bragging rights :)

Um, this is not news, nor debunking

[Lx]

This has been common knowledge for quite a while, so I don't think it qualifies as 'debunking'. Everyone knows that you can't actually perceive 200fps, the point of having insanely fast framerates is so we can have things running in 1600x1200 in 32-bit color and still have the framerate fast enough so that it won't drop below 60-70 fps.

-lx

72 fps necessary, but perhaps not sufficient

[Joe Decker]

That article really oversimplifies a lot of the issues around visual processing.

First, in very contrived circumstances, some individuals have been shown to percieve flicker around 100, maybe even 120 FPS. The numbers vary widely with different people, you can test this pretty easily with a bunch of friends and a multisync monitor.

Second, motion won't be percieved correctly if you have a number of sharp frames moving across the field quickly--even if you're updating at a higher rate of speed. If you took a 1/150th of a second, averaged a bunch of evenly spaced images from that into a single frame (to create motion blur), then used those resulting frames for your movie you'd do fine, but without that you end up with visual artifacts. Since, I believe (and please correct me on this if I'm wrong) this generally isn't done, higher frame rates create a more visually realistic rendition than lower ones, even above 72 FPS.

--j

I also need to get. . .

[KPU]

In order to truly experience 200 fps, I will be buying a new monitor, getting new eyes transplanted, and another brain dedicated to processing images along with the one I have for reading /.

200 FPS??

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are we debunking slashdot, the only weblog on the planet that can attain 200 FPS? (First Posts per Second.)

200FPS is not completely useless

[Nakoruru]

3 reasons we need 200FPS

1.) So that when the frame rate drops it does not drop below 80FPS

2.) So that when we have stereo 3D games and the frame rate is divided between two stereoscopic views it still runs 100 FPS

3.) To simulate motion blur on a screen effectively multiple frames need to be blended together, the more frames the better.

P.S., the article's notion that our eyes somehow work like cameras and we would see objects blinking about without motion blur is silly. The eye does not take pictures which the brain then blurs together. The motion blur is an artifact of the fact that our eyes are continuously sensing light, not snapping photos.

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[ucblockhead]

Yeah, you'll never make President if you don't learn to spell.

(This'll make no sense once I get around to change my sig.)

The importance of framerate

[Adam Wiggins]

Developers and gameplayers alike don't seem to recognize the huge difference that steady, high framerate makes for both the feel and playability of a game.

A game that runs 72fps most of the time but drops down below that, even if it's only a little, will not feel as solid or be as playable as one that holds a steady, say, 60fps.

PC games have always been the worst in this regard, partially because developers assume that better hardware is going to come out that will make their game run faster in the future, and partially because hardware is so unpredictable that getting it running smoothly on one machine doesn't necessarily mean that it will run smoothly on the next.

It's excellent that hardware manufacturers keep pushing the level of performance of their products, but it's not so that we can achieve 200fps with Quake 3. It's so that the game won't drop *below* its peak framerate, ever, even on a complex level with lots of enemies. (First person games have a special need for a high framerate because of the speed with which your viewing angle changes.)

Motion blur- author is wrong.

[Raffaello]

In the article referenced, the author states that motion blur would not be good in games because it would create imprecise locations for game objects, making determination of hits impossible. Here's a quote:

"The lack of motion blur with current rendering techniques is a huge setback for smooth playback. Even if you could put motion blur into games, it really is not a good idea whatsoever. We live in an analog world, and in doing so, we receive information continuously. We do not perceive the world through frames. In games, motion blur would cause the game to behave erratically. An example would be playing a game like Quake II, if there was motion blur used, there would be problems calculating the exact position of an object, so it would be really tough to hit something with your weapon. With motion blur in a game, the object in question would not really exist in any of the places where the "blur" is positioned."

This is just a failure to distinguish between a software *model* and it's screen rendering or *view* (Smalltalk programmers will see this at once). It is perfectly possible to maintain a precise location for an object in the game's model of the it's world, while only *rendering* a motion blurred version of the object. This would allow extremely fast moving objects (projectiles, shrapnel, etc.) to be rendered realistically, while still keeping the game's internal world model as precise as necessary to determine hits, collisions, etc.

In this context, it should be noted that movie special effects make *extensive* use of motion blur to produce extremely realistic renderings of non-existent scenes using very low frame rates. Motion blur should really be seen as the key to realistic rendering, since frame rates will never reach the threshold necessary to freeze extremely fast moving objects. After all, in the real world, one needs a very high speed strobe to freeze a bullet. Frame rates, especially in demanding frames (lots of objects, lots of motion) are not going to hit the 1000 fps mark any time soon. If fast moving objects are to be rendered realistically, then they'll have to be done with motion blur, just as film professionals, like ILM, discovered years ago.

Re:But that is only the average FPS that is over 2

[Malc]

How much of this can be acredited to the CPU having to work on other things too? I play Q3 under Win2K on my dual CPU machine. First of all, I get a base frame rate of about 40% more. On top of that, I don't get such major slow downs when the action gets heavy.

I play with maximum graphical details on a dual P2-450. I get about 90fps, and major gibbing doesn't kill my frame rate the same way it does when I set r_smp = 0. I should point out that at 640x480, the performance bottle-neck for Q3 is the CPU. Turning off all of the detail or increasing the resolution to 800x600 makes little difference. I just like to see things in glorious technicolour rather than hi-res.

I think you have put your hand on it

[twitter]

Try moving your hand between your eyes and your screen. Where did all those fingers come from?! It's a strobe, and that's what you see when you turn your head from side to side too. You can see the dark/light contrast.

The faster the refersh the more fluid that had motion will be and the less your screen will seem to flash as you look rapidly from one corner of your much too big monitor to the other.

200 FPS may really be better.

Poster does not play games.

Fuzzy Science

[bperkins]

In one experiment a picture of an aircraft was flashed on a screen in a dark room at 1/220th of a second. Pilots were consistently able to "see" the afterimage as well as identify the aircraft. This is a very specific situation though, but it shows how sensitive to light our visual system is.

Let's conduct the following experiment:

A) Take an electronic flash and a volunteer into a dark room.

B) Close your eyes.

C ) Hold the flash up to the victim^H^H^H^H^H^Hsubject and trigger it.

D) Run.

Electronic flashes generally have a duration of 1/1000th at most. I'm not sure that concluding that humans can perceive events that have 1/1000th or less of a second duration is useful, especially in the context of this article.