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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.