The Quest For Frames Per Second In Games

VL writes "Ever wondered why it is exactly everyone keeps striving for more frames per second from games? Is it simply for bragging rights, or is there more to it than that? After all, we watch TV at 30fps, and that's plenty." This editorial at ViperLair.com discusses motion blur, the frame-rate difference between movies and videogames, and why "...the human eye is a marvelous, complex and very clever thing indeed, but... needs a little help now and then."

Comments

it plays better

[Song for the Deaf]

With a higher framerate, a game just feels and plays better, it's as simple as that. 30 fps is just *not enough* to have good action and feel on most pc first person shooters.

Ugh

[Elwood P Dowd]

That article reminds me of the TV ads with scientists explaining how our patented hydro-oxytane reaches deep into your pores and assasinates uglificating bacteria.

Author seems to understand about as much about the primate visual system as... well... anyone else that's never studied it. The visual cortex doesn't "add blur."

His general point is probably correct, but is reasoning is fucked.

No

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

1: 30 frames per second is simply not enough. It's fine for movies and TV, but that is only because TV shows and movies are designed around the limits of the medium. Ever notice how TV shows and movies don't have a lot of quick, jerky movements? Those movements lead to motion sickness on TV and in movies, and they are the exact movements in 3D games. 30fps makes me sick, I can tolerate 60fps.

2: Remember, FPS is the *average* framerate. It may dip well below that mark. My goal is not to have the most FPS but to have a reasonably high resolution with FSAA and AF on, all the detail settings to full, and to never have the game dip below my monitor's refresh rate (75Hz).

Some serious flaws render the piece useless

[Jerf]

I like the ideas behind this article (I couldn't immediately Google for a good replacement so there may be room on the web for an article like this) but the author (and there is no nice way to put this) is talking out of his ass. For instance, from the second page:

This is the Visual Cortex adding motion blur to perceived imagery so that rather than seeing everything in great detail, we are still able to perceive the effect of motion and direction as we ride by. The imagery is smoothly flowing from one point to the next and there are no jumps or flickering to be seen. If

the eye wasn't to add this motion blur, we would get to see all of the details still but the illusion of moving imagery would be lost on us, with the brick wall sort of fading in and out to different points. It's pretty simple to test this.

This is idiotically wrong. This entire paragraph is predicated on the false assumption that our eye somehow has a "framerate" itself. (Either that, or the false assumption that our eye is basically a CCD with infinite discrimination, also wrong.) It does not. Our eye is fully analog. (Go figure.) You get motion blur because the nerves and the chemical receptors can only react so quickly, and because nerves fire as light accumlates on the
receptors. Since the receptors are moving quickly relative to the transmitting object, light rays from a given point are smeared across several cones/rods before the full processing of the image can take place. (Now, I'm simplifying because this isn't the place for a
textbook on vision, but at least I know I'm simplifying.) In fact, there's nothing the visual cortex could do to remove the motion blur coming from our eyes, because the motion blur causes actual information loss! (It can (and does) do some reconstruction, but you can't fill in details that don't exist.)

(Note in the portion I italized how he jumps from the "vision cortex" to "the eye"; the two are NOT the same and can't be lumped together like that in this context.)

This simple error renders the entire second page actively wrong.

Here's another, referring to interlacing:

Using a succession of moving images, the two refreshes per frame fool us into believing there is two frames for every one frame. With the motion blur the eye believes we are watching a smoothly flowing picture.

Uh, wrong wrong wrong. Interlacing was a cheap hack to save bandwidth. "Progressive scan" is universally considered superior to interlacing (in terms of quality alone), and many (such as myself) consider keeping interlaced video modes in HDTV to be a serious
long-term mistake. It has nothing to do with convincing you you are seeing motion, in fact it has a strongly deleterious effect because you can frequently see the "combing"; that's why TVs have "anti-comb" filters. You don't see it as "motion", you see it as wierd "tearing".

Like the TV, your Computer Monitor (if it's a Cathode Ray Tube) refreshes by drawing the screen line by line horizontally, but unlike the TV, a Monitor and Video Card doesn't add extra frames. If your screen draws at 30 fps, you will GET 30 fps.

ALSO wrong. The computer monitor and video card will pump out X frames per second, period. It has to. If the CRT is going at 60 fps and the video card (as in the 3D hardware) is only pumping at 30 fps, every frame will be shown for two CRT cycles. What else is the video card (as in the rasterizer) going to display? You'd notice if the screen were blank every other cycle!

CRT Monitors are considered 'Flicker Free' at about 72Hz for a reason, and simply put it's to compensate for the lack of motion blur, afterimages and other trickery we live with every day in TV and Films.

Wrong again. CRTs at that frequency are "flicker free" because they pass the frequency the parts of our eyes more sensitive to motion (actually the peripheral vision, not the "primary" vision we're us

Re:Some serious flaws render the piece useless

[Creepy Crawler]

I messed up the 'quote' delination by putting open-brackets instead of close brackets. Sorry for the jibberish post.

This is the Visual Cortex adding motion blur to perceived imagery so that rather than seeing everything in great detail, we are still able to perceive the effect of motion and direction as we ride by. The imagery is smoothly flowing from one point to the next and there are no jumps or flickering to be seen. If the eye wasn't to add this motion blur, we would get to see all of the details still but the illusion of moving imagery would be lost on us, with the brick wall sort of fading in and out to different points. It's pretty simple to test this.

>>This is idiotically wrong. This entire paragraph is predicated on the false assumption that our eye somehow has a "framerate" itself.

It does. It's about 7000 FPS (+ or - for each individual).

The way bio-psychs tested this is by taking a high-speed controllable projecter that ranged from 30FPS to 20000FPS. Subjects were lead into the totally black room with a mic. Then they were directed to look at the projecter screen by a red dot. Once the pattern started, the projecter took a spread of 3 seconds and at 1 frame put a number on screen. The average FPS for the subjects NOT to notice the number was about 7000FPS.

>>>>(Either that, or the false assumption that our eye is basically a CCD with infinite discrimination, also wrong.) It does not. Our eye is fully analog.

You just cant say that. The ion channels are directly countable and lead to a time based binary system like that of morse code. Not even biologists are sure about that.

>>>>>(Go figure.) You get motion blur because the nerves and the chemical receptors can only react so quickly, and because nerves fire as light accumlates on the receptors. Since the receptors are moving quickly relative to the transmitting object, light rays from a given point are smeared across several cones/rods before the full processing of the image can take place. (Now, I'm simplifying because this isn't the place for a textbook on vision, but at least I know I'm simplifying.)

It's not that the rods/cones (rods are black-white, cones are color) react quickly, it's the chemical breakdown takes a while. Take the simple theater test. Go from sunny outside to a theater room. You pretty much cant see anything. It takes about 15 minutes to FULLY 'charge up' the rods back to full usage. But when you walk out of that sucky movie ;-) , your eyes hurt (due to rapid depletion of rods) and your cones take effect very rapidly.

Other side effects of bright light is that you cannot see absolute 'white' or 'black'. Similar with dark rooms, you cannot easily see color, as it takes high energy photons to allow you to see it.

>>>>>In fact, there's nothing the visual cortex could do to remove the motion blur coming from our eyes, because the motion blur causes actual information loss! (It can (and does) do some reconstruction, but you can't fill in details that don't exist.)

the truth is...

[edmz]

...the are trying to compensate for something.

Grammar?

[JonoPlop]

I tried to RTFA, but I fainted mid-way during the first paragraph.

...computers are tested for there ability to improve frame rates in games.
...heard from your friends about the latest drivers for there system...
...gave them an extra 30 fps over there old card...

(They're all from the one paragraph introduction...)