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30fps vs. 60fps

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"You're wasting your time trying to explain something like this logically to someone who thinks that the human eye can only see 24 FPS. They don't have a clue what they're on about, "

And for every one of those, you get someone equally without a clue making statements like these:

"I for one really appreciate having 100+ in q3 at all times.. anything less is NOT enough once you get used to higher."

As stated by someone else above, you can only "see" as many frames as your monitor is able to draw. If your refresh rate is 85Hz, then you will only be able to see 85 fps, regardless of whether V-sync is enabled or not. All these people sweating the difference between 205fps and 220fps are wasting their time, if a screen refreshes itself 85 times/sec, it doesn't matter if the video card redraws the picture 600 times between refreshes, you aren't going to see any of them.
 
Thankfully i have a high refresh rate then, because it honestly makes a difference with Quakers having higher FPS than most games. I believe the 85 mark could be around where my FPS gets compeltely acceptable, i think anything below that is not CRAP, just noticeably not as smooth.
 
I thought of a reason why 250fps in quake3 is usefull! It just means that when you finally get doom3 on your system, it will be capable of a good 60 fps if you're lucky... And isnt this just the most Fuqing annoying topic to post? Theres always one retard who swears 30fps is enough... you know what, it would be, if there was an option to turn on the v-sync between your monitor and your eyeballs...😉
 
Ya, you guys were right, turn v-sync off to play at rates faster than you're monitor refresh rate. I have no idea how I got them backwards...



<< As stated by someone else above, you can only "see" as many frames as your monitor is able to draw. If your refresh rate is 85Hz, then you will only be able to see 85 fps, regardless of whether V-sync is enabled or not. >>


This is wrong. Ripped from 3dgaming.com:


<< A typical 3D card will use two spaces in memory known as "frame buffers" to construct the 3D image. While one frame buffer is being sent to the monitor the next image is being updated in the second frame buffer by the graphic card.  When the new frame is ready it is ready to be sent to the monitor; however, a problem will often occur when the graphic card is ready to send the image, but the monitor may be still in the process of drawing the first image. V-Synch simply means that the graphic card will wait until the monitor is finished drawing the first image before loading the second image. This effectively will limit the frame rate of your game to be less than or equal equal to the refresh rate of the monitor. So if the monitor is refreshing at 60Hz (in any resolution) then the maximum frame rate would be 60 fps, while a monitor capable of 120Hz would allow you a maximum of 120 fps (most monitors can not handle this refresh rate at resolutions of 800x600 or higher.)
With V-Synch off the 3D chipset will not wait for the card finishing the things it is writing to the monitor.  This causes something called tearing. Which just means that some part of the screen is already the new frame while the other part of the screen in still the old frame.  So the top of the screen is already updated while at some point the old info stills appears. An example of this would be a plane moving from left to right with it's top side being already moved more to the right while the rest is still more to the left.
>>

 
[Enhanced for the hard of seeing] The following post *is not* using average fps(unless stated otherwise), it assumes that fps are constant [/enhanced for the hard of seeing]


30 vs 60fps:

Assertion 1: 2 equally skilled FPS players meet in a close strafing battle. Who wins, the 60fps guy? No, fps has little to no affect on the outcome.

Assertion 2: Same 2 players are trying to snipe each other from opposite ends of a huge map and both appear very small even through a scope. The 60fps guy likely has an edge in this situation, for the 30fps guy likely will need to adjust his aiming more often.



Yes, there is a very noticeable difference between 30fps and 60fps, especially when viewed side-by-side. However, the difference is more cosmetic than it is utilitarian. AKA, the 180fps dude has no play advantage over the 60fps dude who has no play advantage over the 30fps dude.

Knowing that most of you guys are assuming avg. fps, yes I agree, an average of 30fps is going to leave someone on the internet wondering why all your bullets are hitting everything but him/herself. 🙂 Just for the record though, many of us occassionally dip into the 30s and even 20s and don't even notice it. At least as far as affecting our abilities is concerned.
 
"This is wrong. Ripped from 3dgaming.com:"

Everything 3dgaming said is correct, but you are misinterpreting it. Regardless of whether v-sync is enabled or not, your monitor can still only refresh the picture at the refresh rate. The difference between v-sync on and off is with vsync on every frame drawn is a full frame. However, with vsync off, one frame drawn by the monitor may contain parts from multiple frames drawn by the video card. The end result is varying degrees of frame distortion called image tearing which the majority of people would consider an undesirable effect. If you piece together all the frame parts drawn by the monitor, you're still only getting the number of frames equal to the monitor's refresh rate, but now instead of full frames, you have distorted frames.
 
i used to play quake III on a celeron 400 and a voodoo2. i'm a pretty good player, and getting 30 FPS sucks when you are turning. yeah, i could get a lot of kills even with the bad FPS, but close in bad FPS is really a problem when you are circle strafing someone. your apparent skill goes down a lot when a quick turn has 5 big steps in it, believe me. high fps is very important if you want aiming on turns to be accurate.

--jacob
 
Pariah, heh, I misunderstood your original statement, although in many cases the tearing associated with turning off the v-synch isn't too bad and surely exceptable.
 
Regardless, if your system can handle a constant 85fps at 85hz, turning off vsync isnt going to make it any smoother. Youll get more frames displayed, but itll be teared up crap.

Its like saying 60 interlaced fields per second is better than 30 full frames a second, when the source is only 30fps. Obviously not the case.
 


<< Don't forget most people's monitors don't refresh beyond 75Hz, so anything above that is wasted. >>



I'm gonna disagree with that statement. Since most people that are worried about their FPS play games alot, and if you play games alot, you don't use a 75Hz refresh rate. 85Hz is the standard. So anything above 85FPS is wasted. 😉
 


<< "
As stated by someone else above, you can only "see" as many frames as your monitor is able to draw. If your refresh rate is 85Hz, then you will only be able to see 85 fps, regardless of whether V-sync is enabled or not. All these people sweating the difference between 205fps and 220fps are wasting their time, if a screen refreshes itself 85 times/sec, it doesn't matter if the video card redraws the picture 600 times between refreshes, you aren't going to see any of them.
>>



You are assuming monitors draw an image frame by frame this is not true.

Monitors draw images on the screen line by line not frame by frame. A typical monitor running 1280 x 1024 at 85Hz draws a horizontal line every 11 microseconds or 91146 times per second.

Depending on the hardware and software used it is possible to start drawing lines from frame number one then update and start drawing lines from frame two and so forth on a line by line basis. Although I doubt this process is linear, it seems realistic to me that more than 85 frames per second could be interpreted and displayed and would give a better mage on the screen.
 
It also sould be noted that the minimum has to be above a certain FPS. Cus in really complex situations is where you want the FPS to be smooth.
 
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