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PS3 To Run At 120 FPS?
Gamespot is running an article in which crazy man Ken Kutaragi boasts that the PS3 may be capable of running games at 120 fps. From the article: "Never mind that even newer TVs aren't capable of refreshing the screen 120 times in a single second. Kutaragi said that when new technology comes to market, he hopes to have the PS3 ready to take advantage of it. As for the Cell chip at the heart of the PS3, Kutaragi also had high hopes for its future beyond gaming. Using high-definition TV as an example, he said that the Cell chip could take advantage of the technology in many ways, such as displaying newspapers in their actual size, showing multiple high-definition channels on the screen at once, and video conferencing. He emphasized that the Cell can be used to decode more than 10 HDTV channels simultaneously, and it can also be used to apply effects such as rotating and zooming."
There are already some PAL TV's that run at 100Hz so this would be doing them a favour, a big favour.
Oh, come ON now...
F-Zero X ran at 60 frames a second and it looked utterly, silky smooth because it was already past the zone the human eye can distinguish. How is 120 fps going to be better if you can't even distinguish it? Is this going to be a visual version of people claiming vinyl sounds better than CD? Someone tell me, I really want to know.
Second point. It may be able to run at 120 fps, but you can bet that scenes will look better at 60.
Kutaragi: "... and it will able to fly!"
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Who would have thought that the PS3 or any computer for that matter would be capable of refreshing _ANYTHING_ 120 times per second? Oh wait, the PS2 could, given its astounding fill rate and 70+ million polygon per second capacity. Well, I suppose that any computer with a sufficiently fast RAMDAC (circa 1994) could update a scene that quickly. Shucks, since no perspective is provided on the scene complexity, there is no doubt that a Matrox Mystique 220 could draw a single polygon at 120 FPS.
Kutaragi will always promise the Nile. It is his job. In this case, he offered absolutely nothing.
"My God, this must be a truly remarkable corn chip, to be so widely and confidently touted."
*During the "Loading..." screen.
I hear that it will be capable of doing CGI like in "Toy Story", in real time.
Robert
PS. What I do mean, is that I prefer to wait for actual product. And I've heard a lot of wild and unfounded promises from some marketing departments. Just the other day I've read that Sony announced the victory of Blu-Ray format. Before even manufacturing the first commercial disk...
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
When do the 120 FPS human eyes come out?
These organic 60 FPS OEM eyes suck ass, and they are getting worse.
Of course the PS3 can do 120fps, any console can if it can output the signal (say, VGA on X360/DC). No games will ever run at 120fps, they will target 60fps, or 30fps, and they will base all their performance decisions around that number. Why do hardly any xbox games support 720p? Because it takes way more fill rate to draw that huge framebuffer, and they'd rather use those pixels to make the game look better on the majority of user's displays.
Why do I get the feeling that Sony wants to bring the 'fun' of configuring PC games to their console. I can just see it now, do you want to run fast at 480p, or more slowly at 1080i? How about some antialiasing to slow it down a bit more? I even seem to remember them saying something to that effect back around E3. What is the point of a fixed gaming platform if it's going to turn into that mess?
While we are on the topic however, I'd like to address a bugbear of mine - game magazines that crow constantly about the vaunted 60 FPS. I find this to be a little disingenuous.
Televisions run at 30 frames per second, interlaced. That's the only speed available (for NTSC; 25 FPS for PAL, not sure about SECAM).
Are these game reviews just being coy, in using 'little f' fps to talk about fields per second, which are really half-frames? Or do they just not know?
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I agree - this is completely silly.
But your CD / Vinyl metaphor is actually more appropriate when you talk about the 60 FPS thing - 60 FPS is beyond what is perceptible yet you admit it looked silky smooth. Sampling above 16-bit / 44khz is beyond what is perceptible to the average listener, (not really, but was the best compromise back then); vinyl sounds silky smooth.
That said, arguing this on Slashdot is pointless; Slashdot readers seem to have this wierd thing against analog audio. I can only assume that they either have average listening skills or have just never bothered to actually do a double-blind listening test to support their own vitriol.
If you are running a game at only 60 fps on a display of 60Hz, you might not get anywhere near that frame rate. Since the image is generally only updated during vertical retrace (the longest moment when a scanline is not actively being drawn), you effectively have a window into which you have to fit your image. If you miss that window, the same frame is going to get drawn on the display again. Of course, TV signal is different from SVGA signal, and should be a continuous stream including the big black bar where the vertical retrace is supposed to happen (but you can see it when your vsync is off). But that just pushes the timing issue back to a chip inside the playstation, it doesn't eliminate it.
So, anyway, if you're running an -average- of 60 fps but you're actually running 59 fps alternating with 61 fps at -just- the right rate, you can manage to miss the window every other frame with just a very little bit of jitter for a worst-case scenario of 30 fps viewable even though you're rendering 60 fps avg internally. (Most of the time, of course, you won't have a worst case scenario, but OTOH, if you're that close to the line you're likely to have bad synchronization scenarios causing significant frame loss from time time.) At 120 fps rendered, you'd have to have a single frame take double the average time to cause a miss, a much less likely case. In most cases, you'll have two new frames ready to go in time for your deadline.
OTOH, they -do- have effective control of every video buffer, unlike the SVGA case where the deadline lives in the monitor. So in the computer case excessive frame-rate may be the only way to get your viewed frames to match the monitor's refresh speed, but there should be a cleverer solution in the console+tv case.
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Absolute bullshit, and you obviously haven't tested it. Proof: a 60Hz CRT looks flickery, each flicker has to be light *and* dark, therefore equivilant to at least 2 frames, therefore human eyes can see at least 120fps. Get a fast CRT and *test* fps perception before you keep repeating this stupid myth.
When you render for TV you render the interlaced frames at 768x286 x 50fps not the 768x572 x 25fps that the TV displays. (adjust for your local Tv signal encoding - 60fps / 30fps for NTSC)
So that the next generation can render at, wow, twice the speed, comes at not much of a surprise when they are packing multiple 3+Ghz CPUs
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Supposedly, the human eye can only see ~30FPS. However, I can tell a distinct difference between 30FPS and 60FPS. Anything above 60FPS though, looks exactly the same as 60FPS.
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
. . . tuck me in at night and make me soup when i'm sick?
I swear, I need to start making a log of all these claims. That way, all the other technologies come around, we can see how much @$%^@ he really was spewing.
Ken Katuragi: You and your primitive system with its 60 FPS.
Shigeru Miyamoto: What about it?
Ken Katuragi: Oh, nothing, it's cute. Our system operates at 120...
[pause]
Kaz Hirai: Thousand.
Ken Katuragi: Yes, 120 thousand FPS.
Kaz Hirai: Don't question it.
Shigeru Miyamoto: Oh, yeah? Well, the human eye can only process 60 FPS.
Ken Katuragi: Well, that sounds like a personal problem.
Although unfortunately [current TV sets] don't support a 100Hz signal.
Yet. Mr. Kutaragi mentioned this. It's likely that Sony TVs sold in Europe will be the first to accept a 100 Hz component signal, and PS3 games that support 100 Hz will carry a logo like "Tru-100" (I picked a name).
Your mission: Spread this "Tru-100" rumor to all the tech sites.
Have you tried running your monitor at a higher refresh rate? I can spot a huge difference between 144fps @ 144hz and 60fps @ 60hz.
What most gamers don't realise the importance of is sync. Ideally you want the refresh rate of everything to match-- FPS, Monitor, mouse refresh, game engine updates, etc.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
In general, 60 Hz with motion blur looks better than 60 Hz without motion blur. Even 24 Hz in live-action movies can be made to look good because it has motion blur. The point of Sony's announcement is that if graphics hardware can render the scene at a rock-solid 120 Hz, then it can render a scene twice, with all objects shifted slightly, and then use the PlayStation 3 GPU's counterpart to OpenGL accumulation buffers to combine the scenes, giving motion blur.
This doesn't make ANY sense! Apparently, Sony's plot is to make you pay hundreds of dollars for the most useless features EVER!
A) An expensive DVD drive that uses a new format that hasn't even been established yet!
B) A processor NOBODY knows how to program for (I spoke with a guy at IBM about the Cell. He said it'd be at least 4 years before you start seeing anything that takes advantage of it)!
C) The ability to display more colors THAN THE HUMAN EYE CAN PROCESS!
D) And now a framerate that 90% of televisions can't even use!
Normally I don't like to get so worked up about these things, but this is just plain ridiculous. I want to see Sony shut about their specs and see some industry professionals evaluate how actually USEFUL this stuff is. I have a feeling that, in the end, all these numbers don't amount to squat, and you'll be able to play the exact same games on the Xbox 360 and Revolution. When these technologies do start to establish themselves and become noticeable, in about 5 years or so, Nintendo and Microsoft will be ready with new consoles. Sony is essentially trying to skip a generation, not in an effort to actually improve gameplay mind you, but as a marketing tool. Sony sure likes to play the deception game...
In the end, it's PS3 buyers that lose...
correction: 70+ millon polygons a second WITHOUT TEXTURES OR EFFECTS, which is a meaningless number
Not if you have a game in a minimalist graphical style that doesn't need to texture everything, instead spending GPU cycles on transforming and rendering more triangles. You get Katamari Damacy, which uses models at a typical PS1/N64 detail level but puts hundreds on the screen at once for the Prince to roll into a clump.
Either you are trolling or you have no idea how a CRT works.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
You see a diference because a CRT does not display full frames, I how no idea if humans can see more then 60 images in a second, but you can't test it with a CRT due to the technology.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
game magazines that crow constantly about the vaunted 60 FPS. I find this to be a little disingenuous. Televisions run at 30 frames per second, interlaced.
In games that can push a solid 60 fields per second, objects do shift somewhat between the odd field and the even field of each frame, giving the impression of 60 motion steps per second even though each individual pixel is updated at 30 Hz (unless you're using progressive component video). Rendering at 120fps will allow games to use more effective motion blurring, which is the technique that motion pictures use to look good even at 24 Hz progressive.
Are these game reviews just being coy, in using 'little f' fps to talk about fields per second
No, they're distinguishing 60fps (60 fields per second) from 60FPS (sixty cookie-cutter first-person shooter games).
Electron gun scans left to right, top to bottom. Phosphors are excited, fade. The phosphor is excited, it fades, the beam hits it again.... To see a flicker there has to be a change in brightness. Therefore there are at least 2 states, bright and less bright. Therefore if you are seeing flicker on a 60Hz CRT your vision is capable of at least 120fps. Get a fast CRT and test an old game (eg. Quake 3) at 60Hz and 120Hz, with details on low and vsync turned on so the frame rate stays rock solid. Then you will see that 60Hz is in fact *not* "silky smooth", and we can see faster than that. 60Hz maximum frame rate of the eye is a myth.
So, anyway, if you're running an -average- of 60 fps but you're actually running 59 fps alternating with 61 fps at -just- the right rate, you can manage to miss the window every other frame with just a very little bit of jitter for a worst-case scenario of 30 fps viewable even though you're rendering 60 fps avg internally.
Which is why games that advertise "60 fieldz0rz per second r0ck s0lid!!!1!1" are running on engines that can do 75fps but include that margin of safety. When the time to draw a field exceeds 80 percent of 16.6 ms, the game changes the level of detail to ease the vertex processing load and possibly switches to using a simpler shader (even down to plain Gouraud) for faraway objects.
Are you one of those people who thinks humans can't see more than 24 bit color? Display a smooth 24 bit color gradient on a good monitor (ie. a high end CRT, not a television or LCD), and look at all the steps. We need at least 30 bit color. A pity only Matrox realized that and all the other graphics card manufacturers ignore it.
When you render for TV you render the interlaced frames at 768x286 x 50fps not the 768x572 x 25fps that the TV displays.
No, you render for 768x572 and then use a comb filtering RAMDAC to get 2x FSAA. At least the GameCube can be set to do this in hardware.
Did you even read the parent post? It's talking about *synced* to vertical refresh framerates, so the CRT most certainly is displaying full frames.
I'll start paying attention when they put out a press release stating that it can clean my bathroom for me automatically once a week.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Think it's all a marketing tool? Read up in-depth about the Cell processor. PS3 has been pushed as the first big use for it, but as we know Sony and Co are pushing it for use in their TVs and all their other products with chips. They plan for the Cell to last at least 10 years. You can have more than one (it's apparently very easy to have 1,2,3,4... Cells linked together). It may take time to get everyone up to speed on using it (the guy that said 4 years is plain wrong, or very very mean-sprited, I've seen the charts and diagrams and it's going to be easier to work with than the PS2's Emotion Engine, thank god) but once they do the Cell will become part of all our lives, and I think for the better. As someone who is developing games for Playstation 2 on a day-by-day basis, this gets me very excited.
Thank you Ken! Im glad the PS3 will be capable of running in 120 fps ... in a newer tv set capable of handling that framerate (or a monitor) what you failed at mentioning was that just about any console (dreamcast, nintendo 64, xbox, xbox 360, etc) is capable of doing the same. the reason why they dont do that already is because tv's cant handle it. Im sure as soon as other developers realize this they will probably use it too. (revolution, ps3, xbox 360) thanks for the tip.
Not that it helps on anything. since in order to get that speed, you would have to waste twice as many valuable ticks, that could be used for better eye candy, loading, precaching or AI but hey! it runs at 120fps!
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
Supposedly, the human eye can only see ~30FPS. However, I can tell a distinct difference between 30FPS and 60FPS. Anything above 60FPS though, looks exactly the same as 60FPS.
Really? So does watching a movie at the theater bother you? Those are a horrifyingly low 24FPS.
Now I will town down the sarcasm since you probably can see a difference between 30 and 60 FPS. Why? Because those measurements are typically running averages and a 30FPS average can mean the game is dropping down to 10 or 15 FPS. That is definetly visible.
Just to add some detail about why this is stupid...
Douglas Trumbull, who worked on "2001", "Silent Running" and so on, went off and did a ton of basic research on what it would take to get moving pictures so realistic that a viewer couldn't distinguish them from reality.
The results showed that there was no measurable improvement in objective physiological response beyond 72 fps. Furthermore, subjectively people didn't see any improvement beyond around 60 fps.
Sadly, the Showscan company entered liquidation in 2002. Digital killed the chances of 60fps 70mm movies taking off.
But it's a safe bet we won't see 120 fps TVs any time soon.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
No, it's not. It's still got to draw them vertically down the screen; the full frame is not drawn all at once.
On an LCD or any other device that doesn't do scanning in this way, you'll see that flicker is essentially nonexistant at 60 hz - it really is a CRT limitation.
If I were Sony, I'd bring forth a cheaper multi-core processor now, give developers the Cell to work on, and release it in the PS4. Anyone who buys a PS3 early in it's life cycle is just getting ripped off (but they will. It's unfortunate that such a huge percentage of the gamer market have no idea what their buying, they just run off hype).
Little bit of a newsflash, fps is a totally meaningless figure unless you attach to it WICH frame your redrawing X times per second. Sure most graphics cards are not capable at the moment of outputting 120 refreshes per second just as most monitors are not capable of displaying them but generating them is pretty easy. But then my same PC that can easily draw a hundred glxgears per second will probably choke to death on a single frame from the latest cgi movie.
Welcome to the new world of computing where useless marketting buzzwords rule the day. Now if they told me that the PS3 can play everquest 2 with all options maxed out at 120 fps then I would be impressed. Or SWG coronet on a busy day.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I never said full frames *at once*, but it is full frames all the same. It doesn't matter much that the top of the frame is drawn a little bit earlier than the bottom because the eye is an analogue device, it does not scan in frames. Each pixel on the screen is updated at 60fps or 144fps, and that difference is clearly visible.
24fps looks terrible. It's tolerable because of the motion blur, but it looks very far from real. 24fps looks ok for non-realistic animation, because then you are not comparing it to real life.
Hmmm...you do know that it's not really getting ripped off? I mean, you'll be able to play the new games...so it's not like it's something that doesn't function. If it takes them a while to really get into the meat of the Cell then so what? Early adopters drive the market anyway, same with most new products. And I *am* a programmer, and I know the Cell isn't ridiculous. Sorry, but I've just been (last week) at a Cell masterclass given by someone from the SCEE technology division. They answered all our questions straight up we all left feeling a lot more sure about things. No one said it would be perfect but trust me, it's going to be so much easier to program for than the current PS2 architecture. The bandwidth goes through the roof with this baby and the multiple processors are going to help make our code much more efficient. A lot of this is fixing the mistakes made with the Emotion Engine, but still I admire Sony's bravery at developing a multi-purpose chip for the whole gadget market.
I assure you, a significant amount of the flicker you see is absolutely caused by the progressive scanning. Note, I never chimed in one way or the other on whether higher was better - I'm just saying that the progressive way that CRTs absolutely does induce flickering that isn't visible in other displays.
He's too modest to say so, but it's a little known fact that the PS3 will not only be able to play games at 120 fps and decode 10 HDTV channels simultaneously but it will also cure cancer, dispense beer, and give free blowjobs.
It's good to know this technology will be prepared for the future. That way when DNF finally doesn't come out, we'll all have a machine capable of pretending to play it.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Most people can perceive at faster than 60 fps. If you are one of these people, simply set your computer monitor to refresh at 60 hz and then look at it from the corner of your eye. See it flicker? You probably do. Now change it to 72 hz. See it flicker? Probably not. The corners of your eye have fewer color sensors and more intensity sensors, which are more sensitive. More sensitive really doesn't accurately describe it, but less persistence (sort of like how fast phosphors darken on a monitor). This allows us to catch monsters and motion out of the corners of our eyes in low light conditions. Sometimes, when you see something out of the corner of your eye and then turn to look at it and it goes away, you really DID see it out of the corner of your eye! Now, 120 fps is really excessive, but not useless. Many effects such as bloom and anti-aliasing require applying a post-render effect. At 120 fps, you can do your post-render effects and still run 60 fps. Other effects, such as true depth of field, requires rendering the same scene from several camera angles (let's say 8) and blur the samples.
You're agreeing with me without realizing it. Yes, the progressive scanning it what is responsible for the changing brightness, which is equivalent to at least 120 updates per second for each pixel on a 60Hz CRT monitor. An LCD does not flicker at 60Hz because there is no change in brightness.
A CRT does display frames, only they are sloping past to future from top to bottom. Because the eye does not scan in frames the time gradient is not visible, so this is irrelevant.
60Hz CRT flicker is a separate problem from 60Hz animation not being smooth enough, I am only using it as an example to show that 60Hz animation is not smooth enough without you having to test it.
The Japanese article they quoted (http://arena.nikkeibp.co.jp/expo/news/20051028/11 4052/) says Kutaragi talked about PS3 playing movies, not games, at 120fps on future TV interfaces. I'm sure those with very basic Japanese skill can make out it. Huge shame on Gamespot.
To clarify how CRTs not drawing the whole frame at the same time is a straw man, consider three waveforms:
=| ___ ___
A| | | | |
=|___| |___| |__
= ___ ___
B | | | | |
= |___| |___| |
= _ _ _ _
C| | | | | | | | | |
=|_| |_| |_| |_| |_|
Just because a sensor cannot distinguish between A and B, does not mean it cannot distinguish between A and C.
The idea that nothing above 60 FPS is useful is absolute nonsense.
The test which established this compared pre-recorded film shot at different speeds. The audiences were unable to distinguish between films at higher framerates. Fine.
That does not mean that when you are interacting with a computer rendered game the extra information from above 60 FPS is not useful.
If a large object passes across your field of view in life in less than a 60th of a second, I guarantee you will see that object in some way. A bird swooping or a ball dropping will move that fast and be perceptible. You'll probably duck.
On a 60 FPS screen, that object may not show up at all.
If you want to estimate where an object is going to be, you'll want at least three frames to judge the object's path. To get three frames on a 60 FPS screen, you'll need the object to spend at least a 20th of a second moving across the field.
When an animator makes drawings to be played at 24 FPS, he must squash or stretch the object he's drawing to create an impression similar to the motion blur that a human eye experiences when an object moves quickly in front of it. Without squash and stretch, objects seem to float along. Some videogames have started to use calculated motion blur to mimic this, but it doesn't work very well because it erases details the eye can pick out even when an object is moving fast. Bright points tend to motion blur differently than dark spots in real life, but in a game they all blur evenly. It looks like vaseline's leaking out during the movement.
These effects come from this major point: film behaves in a similar way to the human eye. It collects light over a period of time. For this reason, film at high speeds feels no more real than film at reasonable speeds. The frames are all muddled.
A computer does not produce images this way. A computer frame is perfectly clear, pristine, in exactly one place. You can post-process it to add effects, but that requires the programmer to code for each effect. If an effect is forgotten, the eye can pick it out.
It's a lot cheaper to just make the computer very fast so that the eye can collect the light from a dozen frames in the space previously taken by one.
[javac] 100 errors
One of my friends, who is a serious "has no life (or brains I guess)" gamer, said the human eye can only see 256 colors. I was astonished when he continued to argue the point with me! I mean come on! The most I got him to budge was up to 1000 colors when I talked about how his (massive) pr0n collection has changed in quality since 256 colors.
Right now in a lot of games, especially racing games, you have motion blur added to key elements in a scene... other cars, tail lights, lamp posts, etc. You don't need to blur everything, bluring just key elements is enough to create a sense of speed for much less processor hit.
In general, though, you choose your target framerate and balance your technology and artwork around that. If you want motion blur on the main character's sword, you cut the total polys on it in half or re-balance your scene to allocate more clock cycles to the main character. The PS2 could do an insane amount of motion blur if the developers wanted to, and sometimes it does. Heck, the PS2 could probably draw Super Mario Brothers 2 at 900 frames per second, giving you the silky smoothest motion blur you have ever seen.
It is a meaningless statistic, in other words, the equivalent of saying that our system has twice the sound volume of yours.
As a side note, televisions blur themselves a bit between frames, so you get some of motion blur for free.
The ______ Agenda
Before the PS2 was released, there was talk coming out of Sony about how the EE + GS could power billions and billions of polygons, how it would take over high-performance workstations and potentially displace the x86 architecture, and how its DVD player would be more advanced than any standalone player out there. If the PS3 is really as powerful as Sony is claiming, I imagine developers won't ever need to worry about optimizing their code or taking advantage of multi-threading -- the unlimited power of the console will compensate for it (at 120fps, at that). I'm eagerly awaiting the PS3, but this really sounds like Sony Marketing Talk (TM) at work once again. But...maybe I'll just have to get a 6-HDTV array...you know, just in case...
It is not a straw man, it's the reason why you see flicker with a 60Hz CRT but not a 60Hz LCD--it's the technology that causes it, not your eye.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
24fps does bother me. I'm somewhat hopeful the new digital projection standard will lead to some 48fps action movies at 2K. The standard also supports 24fps at 4K, which is what's really needed for giant screens, but I would think test audiences would be more impressed by the smoothness of 48 since so much detail is lost in a blur at 24. Detail that would still be lost at 4K when there's any significant camera movement happening.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Well my point with Vinyl/CD was that some people claim that Vinyl sounds better, or "warmer." But now that I think about it, while I don't think I disproved my own argument, you're right in that it was a bad analogy.
I don't know if it's pointless to argue it on Slashdot. My karma would probably like me better if I didn't but if you're going to say something or not based on the result it'll have on your Arbitrary Good Poster Score then you're worrying too much, heh.
This is just blowing smoke, typical of Kutaragi's usual stunts like the whole 'Playstation is a banned supercomputer' flap they manufactured a while back. Remember the outrageous claims for the PS2? The mind-blowing tech demos with effects you never saw in actual games? Well it gets the job done - press coverage about how mind blowingly powerful the yet unreleased console might be.
Any console can do 120 fps. A NES can do 120 fps if the game is simple enough (Tetris) and you really cared to. It's just a matter of how you divy up your power (and what output rates you decide to support). But usually they 'spend' that budget on better looking graphics instead. It's quite often your memory bandwidth that brings you to your knees if you want, oh, actual polygons and textures.
So yeah, I look forward to 'Now Loading...' at 120 fps.
Wow! Now that's two features I wanted to see for a while.
"We realize you all have found out our cell processor is faulty and more then likely won't be ready for launch summer 2006. But hey! Guess what?! We're gonna run games at 120 fps!" This just sounds way too much like a cover up to me. Honestly anything above 50 is great, they should worry more about whether or not they're even gonna have a system up and running by next year. Guess we'll find out at E3 next year won't we.
while the Gamespot article is indeed misleading, I didn't see anything about movies.
Translation of the pertinent section:
Continuing, he outlined one future technology prediction: the moving image display frame rate. Regarding the 50-60 fields per second current televisions use and the 72-90 frames of PCs, with the PS3, in conjuction with future advancement of the display interface norm, he has decided he wants to be able to deliver 120 frames per second, etc., and higher frame rate imagery. What he brought out in relation to frame rates was a combination of image input and high speed frame rate. For example, the development possibility of a sort of new computer entertainment in which a high speed camera is connected, the meaning of its images quickly analyzed, and the result inputted into games, he expects, is large.
So, Kutaragi did speak of games, but only EyeToy-style ones, and didn't suggest such a high frame rate would be used for regular games, as the Gamespot article implies. The point Kutaragi makes is really just that the PS3 will be able to output at 120 Hz. No reference to movies being played at that frame rate was made, and movies are shot at 24 fps anyway, so you seem very much mistaken.
On the other hand, my Japanese abilities are basic, so if there are any mistakes in my translation, correct me.
30 FPS is visibly choppy. Cinemas / TVs have motion blur to help sort this out, but it is still choppy.
There is a visible change from 60 FPS to 85 FPS too.
A PC game running at 30 FPS is unplayable. There are no two ways about it.
http://www.consensus.com.au/ITWritersAwards/ITWarc hive/ITWentries03/E11BR.htm
Or, at least 25 bit color?
Sony has just put too much burden on the Cell. They have no dedicated sound processor for the PS3... "oh, the Cell will handle it". AI, Physics?... "oh, the Cell will handle it". Keep in mind this CPU has ONE CORE worth talking about, and 7 SPEs that, well, do the best they can. I work for a defense contractor that is using the cell, and I know a lot about it too, me bucko. An objective voice will tell you the SPEs are not good for 3D gaming... it's that simple. And what good is ease of chaining Cells if the PS3 only has one. Here's the bottom line. For the first two years, 360, PS3, and Revolution games will look the same. After that, no one can say which combination of tools, hardware, and talent will pull through.
Yes, that's what I've been saying all along. But the argument is about whether 60Hz animation is smooth enough, not whether a 60Hz CRT flickers.
There is a difference between the persistance of vision and perceiving different quality. The 30fps claim is from the early days of cinema and means that at 30fps a series of single frames will appear to be continuous to the eye. This is not an upper bound, but a lower bound. Try watching a film where the the director pans the camera the wrong way through a crowed scene. It becomes very choppy because you need more than 30fps to do that properly, or fast action sports on tv, or video games...
That's why you can differentiate between 30fps and 60fps. I've not seen any specific research on what the upper bounds are. I think from annecdotal 'evidence' that they vary from person to person. My girlfriend is doing her PhD in pscyhophysical experiments to verify how we perceive rendered graphics but she said that she wasn't aware of any research to determine upper bounds.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
But anything over about 60 fps and I start getting motion sickness just watching. I find if I can force the fps down to about 30 - 40 I am fine, but if it hits that 60 fps level I am running towards a washroom.
"A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'" - DNA
Remember the hype of the PS2 pushing 66 million polygons / sec?
Top actual in game performace was about 10 million.
So using that math (Hype / 6 = reality), PS3 120 FPS equals in game top performance of 15 fps.
Display refresh rates.
:)
Normal TV video refresh rates are 50~60Hz, PC monitors are roughly 72~90Hz, Ken's simply saying that the PS3 can provide refresh rates up to 120Hz once future HDTV units support such rates.
Sorry to pick on your translation, but the kanji translated to "moving image" DO mean "movies" in Japanese. Movies = moving images, no?
budn3kkid
People often get caught up in this mess because studies that try to determine what our senses are capable of are often based on being able to *differentiate* between two different triggers.
So yeah, pull up a gradient at 256 color, 16bit color, and 24bit color. You can see the steps in all of them, with 24bit being the best, of course.
Now pull up one shade of red that is only one step different from another shade of red, at the same time. Can you tell the difference between the two? At 256 color, probably. At 16bit color, no way. At 24bit color, absolutely not. Aha, well the human eye can only detect 256 colors! Wrong, clearly. What we have to realize is that all of this is limited by our BRAIN, not necessarily our EYES. The brain is not very good at differentiating between two very similar things unless that difference is magnified...and in fact it's quite easy to FOOL the crap out of the brain by simply telling an observer that two things are different, when they're not. So, when we look at two very similar colors, we might not recognize that they are different, because we're not so good at that. But we are good at seeing things like "blockiness" in gradients, even though no matter how hard we zoom in we can't quite key in on exactly *what* is causing the blockiness.
Our brains and senses are not simple sampling devices with well-defined limits.
The framerate thing is another good example. I know that movies at 24 frames per second at the theater don't bother me at all, even though I am well aware of the flickering if I concentrate on it (via peripheral vision). So why should 60 frames per second on my CRT monitor bother me? I dunno, but it does. Maybe it's because you have to throw in other factors like the fact that your focal point *moves* around the screen. Maybe it's the florescent lights overhead blinking away at a similar rate. Maybe it's analogous to the gradient effect! When you hit a sensor that is working more in a continuous domain with a discrete signal pretending to be continuous by moving very quickly...it sure seems to be easy to pick up. Dunno, but when I sit down in front of a computer with a CRT at 60hz I sense it *immediately* and adjust the rate up. Most people who are aware of the fact that they *can* adjust refresh rate and have seen the difference between 60 and 70+ will also immediately sense it.
Most modern 3D pipelines introduce a few frames of latency--for instance, on a popular console, the sequence is: controller stick moved, signal is sent to console, at the next vertical blank the new controller position is sent to the main CPU, at which point the gameplay or physics code updates the game state, then builds up a graphics display list to show it, but the previous frame's display list is currently being drawn, so it won't be kicked off until the next vertical blank. So then the new scene is drawn, but it is being drawn to an offscreen buffer so that you don't see the triangles being drawn in, then the NEXT vertical blank, the offscreen is typically copied along with motion blur or other effects, to the actual screen, and only then does the TV start to draw a frame that reflects what the user did three frames ago. So, at 60 fps, this works out to about 45 milliseconds, but at 30 fps it climbs up to nearly a tenth of second.
So for a PC game, running at greater than 60 fps does actually have an effect on reduced latency, even if running at 60 Hz refresh (of course many CRT monitors can go to 120 Hz these days). The old consoles such as the Atari 2600 pretty much drew the picture just ahead of the electron beam--try playing a game like Kaboom! with a paddle on a real Atari connected to a real analog CRT TV (digital TVs can introduce yet more latency) to see what true responsiveness feels like!
Um the human eye can only discern between about 12 to 14 million colours 24 bit colour does over 16 million. Hence it being called true colour. (Incidentally the first time seeing that was on my Matrox Marvel though im not sure who invented the term.)
The other bits for colour are nothing to do with adding more colours they are used for transparencies and infact the bit can go even higher if you want to add even more functionality.
Your evidence of looking at a colour gradient is flawed. There is no way of viewing a gradient of all the colours on your screen because colours have 3 dimensions. RGB or HLS are the typical ones. Even if you could have all the colours there theyd have to be in a row because shifting any out of the row above it or below would create potentially visible gaps. I dont know about you but my resolution isnt 16,000,000 by 12,000,000. You can display two dimensions of the colour though.
<html>
<body>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<script type="text/vbscript">
For i=16 to 100
document.write("<tr>")
For j=16 to 100
k = hex(i)
l = hex(j)
document.write("<td bgcolor=#00" & k & l & ">CELL</td>")
Next
document.write("</tr>")
Next
</script>
</table>
<body>
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Shove the above in to a html file and have a look.
First off forgive me for the horrendous inefficiency of this script and the fact its vbscript. Im no scripter and I dont know how to easily convert decimal to hex in jscript. Im sure anybody who cant run it can make a version for there own setup. If it runs slowly just change one of the 100's to 16.
The display will show a range of colours and no matter how large or small you make the cells you wont be able to see lines between them because the monitor has more colour than you can percieve.
the comment about there only being 256 colours is actually a little more complicated than it first appears. There may well be 256 distinct colours. Last I checked there could be 36 to 360 wavelengths of light you can pick up. (Human eye has been estimated at picking up anything between a nanometre and 10 nanometres between the wavelengths of visible light which is 380 to 740.) however those distinct colours can be darkened, lit or mixed together. Its basically the difference between what our eye can physically pick up and what our brain percieves it as.
All of this isnt a precise science though each of us percieves colour differently some can see more some less but 16 million colours is far beyond the maximum range of colours you can discern.
On the subject of refresh. There are too many factors too truly know whether that will make a difference. How many frames we can percieve isnt the same as how many it takes to look nice for example 85hz is fine as far as im concerned but my eyes can see faster than that. They can certainly see faster than the 30fps of films but the brain is good at filling in the gaps. Ultimately it probably wont make any difference to the experience and is useless at telling us how well the games will play. (How fast a game produces a frame of information (Or timestep in the projects I did.) has nothing to do with how fast a monitor refreshes itself.)
Exactly my point, well put my friend.
As the other poster (budn3kkid) suggests, "douga" ("moving image" in your translation) is an idiom, which means video. You do too much liberal translation, don't you? "Moving image display" doesn't make sense in Japanese, which is my mother tongue.
So how about a 60Hz game with a 120Hz CRT monitor? Wouldn't that satisfy the human eye's limit?
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
just because you personally cannot tell the difference between 25 and 50 frames a second (I HIGHLY DOUBT THIS) does not mean I cannot!!!!
before spouting off some marketing rubbish or psuedo science "fact" that you heard somewhere relating to human abilities, why not use a little common sense (or look up some proper scientific papers on the issue).
If half the people here are stating that they can most definately tell the difference between 30ish and 60ish or 60ish and 100ish frames a second, who are you to tell them they cant? Im sorry, do you have a tag from a higher being that states ? no? then shut up.
I am not aiming all this vitriol at parent poster, but at all similar posters througout this story, and similar stories
I dont understand why around half of people seem to think that "near enough is good enough", and have to complain and whinge and shit upon those who are trying to get technology to the "only perfect is really good enough" stage: happens with almost every media:
sound : oh i heard no one can hear higher than 20 khz, so why do we need more than 40 khz smaple rate? or even worse "I cant hear higher than 15 khz so why bother making technology any better than that?". I CAN hear higher than 20khz (just) but more to the point, have you thought about what shape you get when approcimating a wave with only 2 points? A triangle. and what about aliasing issues?
Video : "oh 25 fps is enough, no one can tell the difference" WRONG I know for certain I can tell the difference between 40 and 60, and personally, would like to see 100 hz or higher as a standard frame rate in video (at least for fast moving action)
happens with discussions of video game/movie resolution too (oh (insert crappy resolution here) is good enough, why would anyone want higher?), bitrates in mp3's suffer from it (oh 128kbit is cd quality....cough.. bullshit.. cough ) and cds (cd audio sampling rate and dynamic range is the best we could possibly ever hear...cough rubbish...cough.. crap)
Could everyone with crappy eyes ears or brain please remember that their OPINIONS of what is necessary to achieve proper immersion in a media are just OPINIONS..
It wouldn't flicker, but it would not be perfectly smooth. We accept that a 60Hz CRT flickers. We also accept that this flicker is constant. Therefore we are seeing at least 2 states (light and dark) for every screen refresh. Therefore the human eye can see equivalent to at least 120 frames per second (remember that the eye is an analog device and doesn't actually scan in frames, we would see beat patterns in the CRT flicker if it did).
120 fps animation may not *always* be distinguishable from 120fps, but when declaring a lossy codec transparent (and video is always a lossy version of real life), we must consider the worst case scenario. Hence mp3 is called transparent at 256kbps not 192kbps, even though 192kbps sounds transparent for a great many sounds. This is why Douglas Trumbull's research is potentially misleading, as while I do not know the exact details of his work, I would not be at all surprised if he only tested real video, and he certainly didn't test modern FPSs. A FPS computer game features much faster motion and camera movement than would be possible in real life.
My point is that you just can't tell with a CRT.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
you not going to even give credit for your joke to ATHF?
Will 120 fps make the next Jak and Daxter worth playing? Will 120 fps make the jumping puzzles in the next Kingdom Hearts well implimented? What about all those PS2 games in my game store's bargain bin? Would 120 fps make those games worth even the 15 bucks they are asking for them? Would 120 fps have put less cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid two? What about Final Fantasy X? Would 120 fps have made that game bearable? What's that? The answer's no? Then shut the fuck up and start making video games. I'll even help you out with an idea I just had. Here's what you do. You take all that money you spent researching or implimenting the 120 fps thing. You take that money and you pick a game developer, and you use that money to subsidize a few more months work on that developer's next game. Odds are that game will be just that much better, or that much longer. Hell, it might even be memorable, like the games we gamers talk about with eachother when we see shit on the horizon.
Yes, we can only discern that many colors, but sRGB color space is not perceptually uniform, so when mapped onto a color space that better matches our vision parts of it do not have enough resolution. 24 bit color would be enough if it was in a better color space, eg. CIEL*a*b*. You test isn't very good because it is possible to subconsciously cheat by predicting where the discontinuities should be. I think it is possible to detect discontinuities in a 24 bit sRGB color gradient, but this is a better way to test this: Construct a cardboard or thick paper covering for the monitor, so only a small window in the middle is visible. Generate a gradient like you described, and offset it by a random amount. Make software to allow you to click on it, and detect whether you clicked on a discontinuity or not. Test multiple different gradients, as some will be much easier than others.
Not quite.
30FPS is a bit faster than the minimum needed for the image to appear continuous and moving, rather than as a series of still images. It is the minimum not the maximum. The average human can tell the difference when shown moving images at greater than 30FPS.
... that's a $500 blowjob for you, sir.
Mind the frickin' laser...
I thought that LCDs didn't update the entire screen at once either. They'd have to have two accumulators behind each pixel or something... Seems unreasonable. About the only thing that really draws the whole frame at once is film, and the frame rates are so low (~24 for normal film, or 30 for IMAX) that it looks like crap anyway. Well, IMAX isn't bad.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Theaters don't run 30 fps anyway, they run about 24. IMAX runs at 30 fps, though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"