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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.
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.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
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.
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
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.
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?
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?
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!
GPL Deconstructed
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?
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.
>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
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.
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I am the dot in slashdot.org
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.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
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.
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.
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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.
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, seehttp://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
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Blancmange
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...).
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.
Because we're bored with their crappy engine, and have been waiting patiently FOREVER for tribes II to come out.
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.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
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..
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.
No.. that simply adds to retention.. so the images is 'there' longer.. there is still the same amount of animation happening.
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
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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?
I do not have a signature
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
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.
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seumas.com
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.
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.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
If I can push 30 I'm perfectly happy.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
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.
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:
What? Are human eyes subject to Moore's Law too, now?
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
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.
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
"They said we couldn't do it [Athlon]... but we built it, we shipped it... and we didn't have to recall it." Rich Heye
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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!
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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.
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.
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.
The article doesn't debunk it. It supports it.
Read up before you post, Tim.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.
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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.
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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.
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).
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
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.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
I remember at the lan party, after that massive gib, 2 computers hard locked. Damn glad i was running Linux :)
Sanchi
"They said we couldn't do it [Athlon]... but we built it, we shipped it... and we didn't have to recall it." Rich Heye
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.
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...
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?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
But above 100FPS, it just doesn't matter. Besides, you're limited by monitor sweep rate and phosphor decay rate.
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.
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]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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:
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.
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 :)
"There is no real right or wrong, just what the majority accepts at the time."
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.)
That's impressive, given that depending on resolution and monitor, you're limited to 75,85, or maybe a max of 100 fps
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
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.
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.
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.