Framerates Matter

An anonymous reader writes "As more and more games move away from 60fps, the myth of the human eye only being able to detect 30fps keeps popping up. What's more, most people don't seem to realize the numerous advantages of a high framerate, and there's plenty of those."

Comments

Motion blur and bloom effects

[sopssa]

The article notes about motion blurring, and links to NVidia's page about it's technology. The last figure shows a terrain with full-screen motion blur effect, which in my opinion is pretty important in games to create that feeling of speed. People usually object against this and bloom effects and just want a sharp picture, but maybe some games have taken it too far. It's important none the less, even if it's not all sharp picture, because your eye picture isn't all that sharp either and you experience the same blur.

Re:Motion blur and bloom effects

[DavidTC]

More to the point, the eye does not work with frames. The eye itself has no framerate.

Rods and cones individually update at about 15 times a second, but each individual one is entirely asynchronous from all the others. One update, another update, another update, etc. Your entire eye is not read 15 times a second, each individual light sensor 'trips' 15 times a second, semi-randomly, and sends the current light level. (1)

While each rod and cone only sends one signal, and then nothing, until it resets and sends another, our brains seems to assume that the light and color levels have remained the same.

Hence we get a 'blur', as objects move, and our brain assumes that said object is also in the old position until all rods and cones have updated.

1) And even that's not entirely right. Each rod and cone is actually sending a sorta average of the light it received since in the last update. You don't have to receive a photon exactly as it updates.

Any animator knows...

[Monkeedude1212]

You can tell the difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS.

The way I tested this was I made a 2 second video in flash, a circle moving from the left side of the screen to the right side. 60 frames. Run it at 30 FPS.

Then I made a second 2 second video, same exact positions. 12 Frames. Ran it at 60 FPS. Asked me, and all of my surrounding classmates, which was about 24 students IIRC.

100% of us noticed a visible difference in the smoothness. Whether our eyes were making out each individual frame perfectly or blurring some together to create a smoother effect, it was irrelevant since there WAS a noticable difference. I was going to slowly bump the 30 and 60 FPS up higher and higher to see at what point the difference is not distinguishable, but I got lazy (High school student at the time.)

The point I think most gamers would agree on is that more frames per second are nice - but that 30 frames per second are Necessary. You can occaisonally dip down to 24 and be alright (24 is supposedly the speed that most Movie theatres play at) - but when you get around 20 or so its really does take away from the experience.

Re:Any animator knows...

[jeffmeden]

You can occaisonally dip down to 24 and be alright (24 is supposedly the speed that most Movie theatres play at) - but when you get around 20 or so its really does take away from the experience.

If by 'supposedly' you mean 'definitely' and if by 'most movie theaters' you mean 'all theaters and even all motion picture production processes in recent years', then yes. The difference is lost on most people, but the reason 24fps is acceptable in movies is that the frame you see isn't what happened at that instant in time when it's displayed, it's everything that happened in the last 1/24th of a second, since it's recorded on film that exposed for that 24th of a second to derive the image. When a computer does it, it only cares about what is happening at that exact 24th of a second; so the difference between a series of exact frames of motion and a series of frames that include the blur of what happens between frames is HUGE.

However, this nuance is lost on pretty much everyone who fires up a computer game, notes the FPS indicator, and goes "OMG I CAN TOTALLY TELL ITS ONLY 30FPSZZZZ!!!! HOW INFERIOR!!!". Whine about framerates all you want, but they are only a small part of the experience.

Re:Where it matters most.

[maxume]

That isn't always the case, I recall a game in the past where gravity had less effect on players that had faster hardware. Or something like that. Anyway, the logic was mixed in with the rendering, so frame rate had an impact on what the player could do.

The difference in framerate

[DeskLazer]

15 FPS vs 30 FPS vs 60 FPS. This is a visual representation. There are points made, however, that when you watch a movie, the image is "softened" and runs at a lower framerate [something like 24 or 25 FPS?] because your brain helps "fill in the gaps" or something of that sort. Pretty interesting stuff.