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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."
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."
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?
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.
How is 120 fps going to be better if you can't even distinguish it?
Same people want Quake 3 to run at at an average 300fps! It means that when you hit high poly regions in the game then the fps won't dip down to 12fps where you can actually notice it in really detailed rooms.
The higher the average the fewer times you reach a level of bad frame rates.
I'm not sure if he meant average FPS though.
Still the higher the better regardless of if the eye can see it because you can squeeze more polygons into the frame.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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
There isn't a set rate at which your eye runs at, just like there isn't a resolution for your eye- more pixels and more fps are going to look smoother than less, there's no hard limit just a point of diminishing returns.
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.
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