What is considered a "smooth framerate"?!

[DeathReborn]

Originally posted by: KeepItRed
60+ is what the eye percieves as smooth. Anything over 60 cannot be seen or noted by the eye. Anything under 60, you will notice it's becoming a slide-show.

QFT

Anything over approximately 60fps is missed by the human eye/brain combo. Personally I find 45fps smooth.

 

[destrekor]

Originally posted by: DeathReborn

Originally posted by: KeepItRed
60+ is what the eye percieves as smooth. Anything over 60 cannot be seen or noted by the eye. Anything under 60, you will notice it's becoming a slide-show.

QFT

Anything over approximately 60fps is missed by the human eye/brain combo. Personally I find 45fps smooth.

35+fps is smooth to be, especially if it dips to 20 like in CoD2 for me, then you can really see the difference and your mind just thinks its smooth.
although even at 35fps solid, it feels smooth to me.

motion blur would be an awesome technology to implement into videogames, like Valve wants to do with the source engine.

 

[xtknight]

I recommend this read: http://amo.net/NT/02-21-01FPS.html

The USAF, in testing their pilots for visual response time, used a simple test to see if the pilots could distinguish small changes in light. In their experiment a picture of an aircraft was flashed on a screen in a dark room at 1/220th of a second. Pilots were consistently able to "see" the afterimage as well as identify the aircraft. This simple and specific situation not only proves the ability to percieve 1 image within 1/220 of a second, but the ability to interpret higher FPS.

Also from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frames_per_second#Frame_rates_in_video_games

An example of afterimage separation can be seen when taking a quick 180 degree turn in a game in only 1 second. A still object in the game would render 60 times evenly on that 180 degree arc (at 60 Hz frame rate), and visibly this would separate the object and its afterimage by 3 degrees. A small object and its afterimage 3 degrees apart are quite noticeably separated on screen.

Thus the human eye can smoothly see at "180 FPS" as rated in the game, or "90 FPS" with field super-sampling. Film has that, motion blur, so 24 fps is perceived as being fine. Though personally, films look jerky to me. It's probably still only reaching a net of 48 "fps". Most movie projectors also produce the afterimage due to their bright emission. It's like blur on LCDs, some people are more sensitive to it than others (and still some are more bothered than others, but that's a subjective matter). Or the rainbow effect on single chip color wheel DLPs. Their brain can definitely interpret the image faster than other peoples'.

http://www.daniele.ch/school/30vs60/30vs60_1.html

 

[Conky]

Originally posted by: xtknight
I recommend this read: http://amo.net/NT/02-21-01FPS.html

The USAF, in testing their pilots for visual response time, used a simple test to see if the pilots could distinguish small changes in light. In their experiment a picture of an aircraft was flashed on a screen in a dark room at 1/220th of a second. Pilots were consistently able to "see" the afterimage as well as identify the aircraft. This simple and specific situation not only proves the ability to percieve 1 image within 1/220 of a second, but the ability to interpret higher FPS.

That "simple and specific" situation is a very poor proof of anything other than the ability of the eye to see something that is shorter than 1/60th of a second. Human vision is continuous is all this situation proves.

Show me a study where a pilot is shown a white light for 1/220th of a second, then in the same spot a red light for 1/220th of a second, followed by a yellow light for 1/220th of a sec. He will see only one light and you would have me believe he could not only know that it was, in fact, 3 different colors but also that he could tell you what order they were in. :laugh:

There is lot's of bad information on the web and that linked article is a fine example of that.

 

[xtknight]

What is your explanation of how so many people on this forum including me can so easily discern the difference between 60 FPS and 75 FPS in a game? Hell, not to mention with mouse movement over the desktop (at 60 Hz vs 75 Hz). It's blaringly obvious to me. I have an LCD so flickering is not an issue here if it mattered at all.

Oh, it's 60 FPS and 75 FPS stable as well. Quake 3 can run at about 1000 FPS on my PC, so I cap it to 60 FPS using in-game com_maxfps (as well as set display to 60 Hz), and for 75 respectively. It's actually capped at the nearest millisecond reciprocal so it's more like 62.5 and 76.9 FPS.

 

[destrekor]

yea, likely he would see a mesh of color, I dunno... some ugly green? lol
if you did that with 3 colors (red, green, blue) you would see a meshed composite white..... and never know the other colors ever existed.

recognizing afterimages is a different thing altogether. afterimages are burned into everyone's minds when seeing one thing that stands alone against a blank background, especially if its a dark room.
stare into a light for as short a period as possible (open and close eyes real quick)..and tell me you cant still see that light in your eyes. afterimages are a natural ghosting effect our eyes have, especially with lights.

its hard to explain, but in constant motion (not a split second), in a GAME, 60fps is what the normal eye can detect.
how far apart the afterimage is from the actual object in-game does not represent how many frames we can see. i cant explain what is represents... and nor can i explain how its different.
im no wiz when it comes to that kind of stuff, but i can understand the logic. but i also cant even explain the logic lol

 

[destrekor]

Originally posted by: xtknight
What is your explanation of how so many people on this forum including me can so easily discern the difference between 60 FPS and 75 FPS in a game? Hell, not to mention with mouse movement over the desktop (at 60 Hz vs 75 Hz). It's blaringly obvious to me. I have an LCD so flickering is not an issue here if it mattered at all.

Oh, it's 60 FPS and 75 FPS stable as well. Quake 3 can run at about 1000 FPS on my PC, so I cap it to 60 FPS using in-game com_maxfps (as well as set display to 60 Hz), and for 75 respectively. It's actually capped at the nearest millisecond reciprocal so it's more like 62.5 and 76.9 FPS.

you should be a fighter pilot
i can not tell anything apart above 60fps. Maybe all my eye problems (not 'bad' vision somewhere in the order of 20/50, but astigmatism, slight colorblindness) equate to not good enough mind/eye speeds to detect such extreme frame speeds.

 

[xtknight]

Alright. I tried Quake 3@60FPS/60Hz/Vsync (r_swapinterval 1) and Quake 3@75FPS/75Hz/Vsync. 60 FPS is smooth, and 75 is smooth as a baby's ass. We'll leave it at that. I definitely could detect a subtle difference though, I'm not BSing. But the eye thing aside, I'd say you need 75 FPS in a game to have your input (mouse) feel smooth. 60 FPS made my mouse quite laggy vs. 75.

Nothing was as smooth as Quake 2 at 120 Hz on a CRT and the video card rendering FPS somewhere in the googolplexes. Hooly crap that was smooth. I could tell the difference between 120 and 60 definitely. Maybe it was because of the flickering.

I have got an astigmatism and needed a 225/250 correction since, so that could be why I can't tell it quite as much now. Those numbers were the correction numbers, not like "20/20 vision" I don't think. Mine was 20/400 IIRC, or is it the other way around? Maybe I should try it with my glasses (which I really should be wearing, cough).

 

[Conky]

Originally posted by: xtknight
Alright. I tried Quake 3@60FPS/60Hz/Vsync (r_swapinterval 1) and Quake 3@75FPS/75Hz/Vsync. 60 FPS is smooth, and 75 is smooth as a baby's ass. We'll leave it at that. But the eye thing aside, I'd say you need 75 FPS in a game to have your input (mouse) feel smooth. 60 FPS made my mouse quite laggy vs. 75.

Nothing was as smooth as Quake 2 in Win 98 at 120 Hz on a CRT. Hooly crap that was smooth. I could tell the difference between 120 and 60 definitely.

A better comparison would be if you could truly see the difference between 100 frames and 115 frames. Limiting it to 60 is too close to the threshold.

Minimum framerate is the key. I have better than average vision and always have. As long as my frames are at least 60(and there are programs that can measure minimum, average, and high framerates) I couldn't tell the difference to where I would bet on it and I'm a gambling man, lol.

:beer:

 

[xtknight]

I'll admit I can't tell it between 100 and 115 frames like that (well it's possible but I doubt it). But it's something about 60 and 75, and 60 and 120. 100->115 is less percentage of a difference than 60->75 though, so that's still an argument. 60->120 is a huge difference. Let's say I prefer 120 then. As far as games go, hell, I can play them at 45 AVG but it's not smooth. 60 minimum at the least IMO. Your mouse speed may still be capped at FPS though, depending on how the game's synchronization works.

 

[destrekor]

perception may be the key... you know 120fps is better and it is conceivable you notice it is more than 60
but yea, can you tell 70 from 100, and pinpoint to about how many frames?
anything around 40-60, its much easier to pinpoint a guess of how many frames... you could see 40 and say 45... if i saw 80, i'd probably guess anywhere from 50-100 lol
especially since i cant tell 90fps in HL2 from 60fps

 

[BillyBobJoel71]

A game at 400+ hz would appear to be perfectly smooth. Our eyes can detect motion in the 44000hz range, but very few things move that fast.

 

[xtknight]

Could be something with VSync as well. 62.5 FPS/60 Hz without VSync jittered. With VSync under Q3 (r_swapinterval 1), it was smooth as hell, relatively. 62 FPS is not perfectly synchronous with 60 Hz of the monitor which could explain it. However 62.5 is as close as the game's internal timer can get to capping it at 60 Hz. It just waits a 16th of a second per frame, so ends up being 62.5 ((1/16) * 1000). Not sure how VSync does its magic in that case.

 

[VIAN]

Originally posted by: Dance123
Hi,

1/ First of all, what do most people consider a "smooth framerate"? Is it true that this is 70fps, what do you think?

2/ Second, is it true that you can get certain problems if your framerate is the same as your refresh rate or someting like that. I believe I once read something like that. Anybody knows more about this?!

3/ I believe 75Hz refresh rate is good enough, but if you can select higher like 100Hz or above, should you do that? Any benifits to go highe then 75Hz, what are the possible disadvantages if going (too) high? What are the guidelines here? Can a higher refresh rate lower performance or something? Anything else I should know?..

I hope you can help me with these questions! Thanks!!

1. Smooth framerate is subjective and it can range from 30- 80fps or higher. Personally, 50fps is smooth enough. However, I can accept 30fps if necessary, but not below.

2. If you have V-Sync On, then having your fps fall below your refresh rate will decrease your average fps by a lot. You will also notice framerate jumps from 60fps one second to 30fps in the other (if your refresh rate happened to be 60Hz). If you have V-Snyc Off and your fps goes above your refresh rate, it can increase the occurrence of tearing, which is when part of the screen shows the present frame and part shows the previous frame.

3. If you have a CRT, then 85Hz is minimum for flicker-free. Unless you notice flicker at that refresh rate, there is no need to put it higher. However, putting it higher may help smooth out the framerate jumps that occur with V-Sync enabled. Higher refresh rates also decrease the life of CRT's. And if you push it too high, with respect to resolution, you could get degraded image quality. If you have an LCD screen then there is no benefit from running out of spec. Even if you have a LCD that runs at 75Hz, the LCD won't be fast enough to show more than 60fps without ghosting.

Now to kill these spammers...

Originally posted by: KeepItRed
60+ is what the eye percieves as smooth. Anything over 60 cannot be seen or noted by the eye. Anything under 60, you will notice it's becoming a slide-show.

Ha ha. What a funny guy.

Originally posted by: Griswold
Because its biological fact. Your eye/brain cannot see those 115fps, but due to the way objects are rendered and presented on screens, you will feel it as being smoother - but not because your eye/brain can register each of the 115 frames per second. Otherwise you could distinguish between slow motion secene at 50fps and 100fps, which you cant. Its the fast moving scenes where its at.

Just because you don't notice the flicker, doesn't mean that you can't see the difference. Remember, CRT's have phosphors, which hold light and glow for a certain period of time. That's why we don't notice the flicker. Biological Fact? You're right about noticing it in fast motions. This is precisely why we can see 115fps. If you tune your CRT to 100Hz, I bet you'll notice that the mouse is much more sensitive compared to a lower refresh rate, such as 85Hz. Why? Because you see the extra frames. Because you aren't moving the mouse any faster, but the display is just showing it to you faster. This is proof that you see those 115fps.

Originally posted by: destrekor
its a joke that people think there is a competitive edge to have 100fps over 50fps. You're not rendering the same number of frames at half the speed, or else it would look like a slowmotion video. games are set to render copies of frames. its illogical that there would be a gaming edge.

now run a demo-loop (like quake 4 demo recordings, or half life 2 demo recordings), and there is a set number of frames. so on some systems, some scenes may look like slow motion while others look like fast-forward, all depends on the system playing the demo-file as well as the system that recorded it. games are not played in this manner. again, because either 50fps would look like slowmotion to a 100fps system, or the 100fps system would look like the game is on fast-forward compared to the 50fps rig.

There is a competitive edge. See Idk what you're talking about. Do you know what the difference is between 100fps and 50fps? Smoothness to the eye and response time. The response time is where the advantage is. Quicker reflexes, that sort of thing - think about it.

Originally posted by: Crazyfool
The key to framerates is not the average framerate but the minimum framerate. If you never dropped below 60fps you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between 60fps, 150fps or 5000fps... the human eye/brain can not process more than 60 frames per second. Period.

Your so smart. Show me the detailed scientific study that says that the human eye/brain cannot process more than 60fps.

Originally posted by: Crazyfool
Show me a study where a pilot is shown a white light for 1/220th of a second, then in the same spot a red light for 1/220th of a second, followed by a yellow light for 1/220th of a sec. He will see only one light and you would have me believe he could not only know that it was, in fact, 3 different colors but also that he could tell you what order they were in. :laugh:

That isn't the point. The point is that he was able to see and identify the airplane. If you sent the lights one right after the other, it would be a lot of different information to see so fast. On the other hand, seeing on frame of a game right after the other, you wouldn't notice the kind of difference you want, duh, because if you did, then it would be choppy. But you would notice it as smoother than something with a lower fps and that's good enough to show that we can see them.

And remember: you have to have a monitor capable of a refresh rate as high as the frame rate you are trying to see, or else you won't notice a difference.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

For me, it depends on the game. RTS and RPG games are smooth at about twenty, slow-paced FPS games like Deus Ex or Ghost Recon are about twenty-five, and fast-paced FPS games like UT2004 are about fourty.

 

[SynthDude2001]

I generally only play FPS games - in those, a consistent 60fps is what I'd consider smooth. I can tolerate lower, but I really don't like to go below 45-50 in multiplayer and maybe 35-40 in slower-paced single player games. More than 60fps is nice - 85fps (consistent) is very nice and 100+ is even better (and yes, I can tell the difference in how smooth those higher framerates are), but I've got to settle for 60/75 since I'm using an LCD now (which is fine).

 

[Griswold]

Originally posted by: xtknight
Alright. I tried Quake 3@60FPS/60Hz/Vsync (r_swapinterval 1) and Quake 3@75FPS/75Hz/Vsync. 60 FPS is smooth, and 75 is smooth as a baby's ass. We'll leave it at that. I definitely could detect a subtle difference though, I'm not BSing. But the eye thing aside, I'd say you need 75 FPS in a game to have your input (mouse) feel smooth. 60 FPS made my mouse quite laggy vs. 75.

Thats really funny. You should let somebody else set that test up for you and do 10 samples (or 100 if you wish) with these two framerates and I'm willing to bet you fail miserably.

Its clear whats going on here, you know which is which and you're convinced you can distinguish the two framerates which leads you to believe you can see a difference. The human brain is sometimes a really funny thing.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Does anyone know if FPSCompare is available online anymore? It can stop a lot of this moronic "your eyes can't distinguish anything over 21-60 fps anyway" BS. It is a great tool for demonstrating that most people can differentiate between 90 and 120FPS without the slightest problem(providing you have a monitor that supports 120Hz). How much of an impact it makes for each person is the only real question.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker
Does anyone know if FPSCompare is available online anymore? It can stop a lot of this moronic "your eyes can't distinguish anything over 21-60 fps anyway" BS. It is a great tool for demonstrating that most people can differentiate between 90 and 120FPS without the slightest problem(providing you have a monitor that supports 120Hz). How much of an impact it makes for each person is the only real question.

http://swc2.hccs.edu/evan/fpscmp02.zip

Originally posted by: Griswold
Thats really funny. You should let somebody else set that test up for you and do 10 samples (or 100 if you wish) with these two framerates and I'm willing to bet you fail miserably.

Its clear whats going on here, you know which is which and you're convinced you can distinguish the two framerates which leads you to believe you can see a difference. The human brain is sometimes a really funny thing.

My grandma would be able to tell the difference in mouse movement. It's a little harder to SEE the difference in synthetic tests because I have an older, slower LCD (getting a new one this week), but on a CRT it's night and day. On either display, the FEEL of 60 Hz is night and day against 75 Hz. If you're so convinced why don't you try it? You'll eat your own words once you move your mouse on your desktop at a 60 Hz vertical then at 75 Hz. In fact, I can't stand the 60 Hz rate. Move your mouse in a circle and see for yourself. I thought something was wrong with my display, but alas it's just because it defaulted at 60 Hz.

 

[JonnyBlaze]

people that think you can see a difference between 60 and higher fps are idiots who believe anything they read.

for fps games i prefer 85 or higher.

 

[Eureka]

Well 30 frames is the minimum at any time for smoothness for me. With that being said, the average framerate should be over 60 so that it won't drop under 30.

Norm

 

[Acanthus]

40 MINIMUM framerate is smooth for me, an average of 40 is bad.

 

[HybridSquirrel]

my card does about 105 fps for cs:source and my monitor only will go up to a 60hz refresh rate and it seems nice to me

 

[VERTIGGO]

well, as long as it stays above 30fps, its not "technically" choppy, because that's standard cinema, but the way that games are displayed requires higher frames for the best experience. I shoot for 60 simply because it works best on LCD and is perfectly smooth. Any time it starts to dip, not only do you lose refresh rate, but you are likely to lose smooth gameplay, because your hardware is "hitting a wall", and you notice that you are less effective (especially in FPS games).

Yes it's true that 75Hz looks better than 60Hz, but thats a result of the way a CRT refreshes, not that your eyes see more frames. Also, the horizontal refresh rate usually lower than the vertical refresh rate. (On my CRT, at 60Hz vertical, the horizontal is at 53.8Hz, which is visible. At 75Hz, its 67.5Hz). Just something to consider.

 

[Leper Messiah]

35+ is normally good for me, but hell, I used to do well with UT2k4 running at like 25 on my old PIII