More than 30FPS useless

There is an excellent article in the November 2000 Scientific American written by Alvy Ray Smith (co-founder of Pixar, Microsoft Fellow in Graphics, winner of 2 Academy awards) that outlines the requirements for perceiving a true virtual reality.

The flicker frequency (the point at which the average human stops seeing individual frames and starts seeing movement) lies above 15 frames per second. Hollywood movies run 24 frames per second to get smooth action.

Flicker at more than 30 FPS is imperceptible to ANY human. Although card makers are falling over themselves to offer higher frame rates, this is marketing, not product improvement. Just like a 48x CD player or a 1.5 GHZ P4, the bigger then number, the better the sales. A lot of gamers think the frame rate matters, but that is because they set the speed. Have someone else set the FPS setting on two monitors and do a side-by-side comparison to see if you can tell the difference.

Unfortunately, it\'s not one of the linked articles on the AS web site, but the title is "Digital Humans Wait in the Wings" by Alvy Ray Smith

So there\'s no difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS since my eyes can\'t tell the difference.  It\'s just hype.  Seems reasonable. Is this true?


[Edited by Shawnimal on 12-22-2000 at 11:11 AM]

I disagree. While the human eye may not perceive the decrease in flickering, I can certainly see an improvement in game speed, smoothness and overall animation. 60fps is the way to go, easpecially in driving games.

Just try convincing some "Quake-heads" that running under anything but 60fps is not noticable  

Yeah its true.  I have heard this so many times in reference to Quake..  I don\'t really know what the deal is, but I do know the human eye can not see more frames per second than that.  But I think the increase frames make it look a lot nicer when you have depth.  The more frames per second the better things look further back in the game.  I am prolly wrong here, someone else should be able to answer this..

You\'ll only notice if it drops BELOW 30 FPS... If 20 monsters jump out at you and the frame rate drops to 5 or 10 FPS then you\'re going to notice... so higher framerates only help because they pump up the lower average.  More power is needed maintain 30 FPS, which is why they make try for 60 FPS.  So pumping up the lower end is important NOT the higher end.

At least that\'s MY theory.

[Edited by Shawnimal on 12-22-2000 at 11:27 AM]

Kazunori Yamauchi said they were allowed to do much more precise physics modelling for GT3, due to the fact they could run the game at 60fps. So it is not meaningless, neither useless

This theory is total bullsh@t. it\'s obvious that the eye can see well over 30FPS. i don\'t need any
technical knowedge of the human body to tell you this. ANYBODY can tell the difference you play a game at 30FPS as apposed to 60FPS.

GT2 ran at about 28FPS, look at GT3 it runs at 60FPS
Nevermind the difference in visual properties, just look how smooth the screen updates on GT3.

I can\'t believe that some people would turn around and say that the human eye cannot distinguish anything over 30FPS.

Hawke , the physics in GT3 are updated at 120FPS as opposed to 15-30 in GT2, you will notice i guarantee :0)

I\'m not bashing anybody, Just my opinion

i get a headache looking at 30 FPS.  that theory is complete bull****.  along with the 48x cd rom one, no offense.  

mm

Originally posted by mm
i get a headache looking at 30 FPS.  that theory is complete bull****.  along with the 48x cd rom one, no offense.  

mm

Absolutely right.When I concentrate myself on a racing game with 30FPS, I get tears in my eyes after a few minutes.

It\'s bull****. Experts have said you can\'t see colors or read in your dreams, cause it doesn\'t make sense scienifically. Since I\'ve done both, and can tell the difference between 32 bit, and higher, color spectrums (which you also \'can\'t\' do), I say this is bull**** too.

hmm, just to feed the argument I have a few things to add.  If you\'re playing games on a TV, then it\'s drawing 60 fields per second, which is only 30 full frames.  So then the argument becomes whether or not the half screen updates that you would get from 60 fps (where the lines in each field don\'t match up with the ones above/below) contributes to smoother animation or visible aliasing.  Also controller input is frequently done after every frame, so the game might just feel better at 60fps.  I really couldn\'t tell the difference between 30 and 60 fps if they were both constant.  But, I hate to play games where the framerate goes between 25 and 35.  And, anyone saying the animation of gt3 (60fps) is better than gt2(30fps) had better have seen it in real life since I have yet to see a ps2 video captured at 60fps.

-greg

[videoholic]

Originally posted by StAnZo
This theory is total bullsh@t. it\'s obvious that the eye can see well over 30FPS. i don\'t need any
technical knowedge of the human body to tell you this. ANYBODY can tell the difference you play a game at 30FPS as apposed to 60FPS.

GT2 ran at about 28FPS, look at GT3 it runs at 60FPS
Nevermind the difference in visual properties, just look how smooth the screen updates on GT3.

I can\'t believe that some people would turn around and say that the human eye cannot distinguish anything over 30FPS.

Hawke , the physics in GT3 are updated at 120FPS as opposed to 15-30 in GT2, you will notice i guarantee :0)

I\'m not bashing anybody, Just my opinion

You only see 30 Frames per second on a tv anyway.  The fact that it can produce twice as many frames makes it smoother probably because there is no lag.  It works kind of like a buffer.  It\'s capable of far more than it needs to which makes it smooth as hell at 30.  That is my theory.  As long as the game produces a rock solid 30 fps, then there is no way you can tell a difference.  

It\'s kind of like ordering a drink.  Say you have a 32oz cup.  The waitress says, "Well I am alloud to pour you 64 oz if you like.  You\'re paying for it anyway."  You say OK, knowing full well that 32 oz are going to fall onto the floor and be uf no use.  

As long as she always pours you 32 oz, you will never really know how much more she is pouring because it doesn\'t really matter.  Now if she pours you 30oz then you notice a difference.  

And don\'t get me into the whole how much coke you waste with ice issue.

 I just thought of one more thing.  If a TV does 60 fields per second, then the only framerates which sync properly are 60, 30, 15.  15 is too low so you can ignore it.  So, if the TV is only going to show full frames/fields (like v-sync on a computer) than a framerate of 25 would reapeat 5 of those frames every second, making it look jerky. The same would also be true for 50 fps.

-greg

you got it man, that is the same reaosn you will not see a gaming console come out that is gonna be 115 bit, it wont wor\'t, and if they do make it the graphics will be very Jerky , we are not as dumb as MS advertisement ajencies think we are , cause they tell us that there is a big difference between 120fps and 140fps, but there really isn\'t if your T.V. does not have a refresh rate of the same or higher

The problem is that the human\'s eye works like a camera. It captures the light during a certain time. If something is  in movement, then it makes a motion blur effect to get a smooth movement. This is just how a camera works, and this include a movie camera, so the comparison with movies is useless( BTW the movies are filmed at 24 fps but every frame is displayed twice).
Also screen refresh and movement are different. Only a few people could notice more than 60 Hz of screen refresh in a monitor, but everyone could notice the difference between 30 fps and 60 fps in videogames. That\'s cos the graphics don\'t use that motion blur/camera effect so it needs 60 fps to get a smooth movement( even if they could apply that motion blur effect to the games, the 60 fps will still provide a smooth image).

Well I can tell the difference of a PAL TTT and a NTSC TTT.
Also the contols in the PAL version does not respond as fast as the NTSC vesrsion.

So I agree a lot with Skippy-g.