What is this obsession with framerates over 30FPS?

[xPixelatedx]

Indeed, movies and television have a framerate of 24 FPS, and no-one seems to find any problem with them being choppy or slow.

So why so much freakout at frame-rates being capped at 30 FPS, or this obsession with getting it up to 60? if you've surpassed the point needed to create the illusion of a fluid, moving picture, do you really need to push it even father?

If it is already real, then 24fps is where you want it.

If it is unreal (a game or CGI movie) then 60fps is where you want it.

I have a 120hz TV and I can create the effect of doubling the framerate of anything I watch, so I know what movies look like at 60fps. They look like home movies, taken with a camcorder. It's really a very jarring and unpleasant effect. The reason for that is anything above 30 starts to make things look more true-to-life in motion, with 60 being the sweet spot. Obviously, this has a more dramatic and positive effect on games, which can only get better with added smoothness. That said, Avatar (a 90% CGI Movie) looks amazing with 120hz!! the reason why people usually stop at 60 is because that's the point the human eye stops registering. So once a game has reached 60, you are starting to see the game world in the same way you would see it as if it were real. Move your hand around in front of your face... yeah, you could say that's the equivalent of 60fps. So that's the answer to your question.

This also has absolutely nothing to do with people bragging about their PCs. While rare, I have played numerous console games at 60frames. There was several small points where Jumping Flash (a PS1 game) hit 60, and it also looked amazing.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Well to put in the simplest terms possible, the greater the FPS the greater the illusion.

 

[NathLines]

I'm fine with 30 FPS if it's constant. If it dips below, I get naseous. Same with low FoV.

Also, when you've gone 60, you just don't want to go back if possible.

 

[Daemonate]

God, people oversimplify this to the point of nonsense....

 

[RaikuFA]

All I have to say about this is lol@graphics over gameplay and/or story.

 

[Braedan]

Why don't we just go back to 800x600 with no AA and only 64MB of total game data.

I'm obviously exaggerating, but faulting people who can afford to buy technology that is better than consoles made 5 years ago is a little strange. For some reason everyone (from my experience) who doesn't own a PC capable of gaming thinks that we spend thousands and thousands every year to make sure we get 6 more frames per second. (exaggeratioooooon)
Very few PC players that I've met bother with that crap. My computer has a motherboard from 2008, and a video card from 2010. I can max most games I find.
What I'm getting at, is that the jump from 30FPS to 60FPS is quite noticeable, so when it's cheap and easy to do it on games that aren't as much of a resource hog as Skyrim, we're going to do it. The game plays better, feels better, and is more enjoyable.

Here's a side by side (top by bottom?) comparison of 30 FPS http://boallen.com/fps-compare.html. It's very noticeable just watching, but when you have to interact with 3D objects moving at those frame rates its even more so.

Edit: and damn. I was ninja'd on the link...

 

[veloper]

Whats up lately with people trying to force their ridiculously low standards onto everyone else?

30 fps is slow and in a competitive shooter match you'd be at at a huge disadvantage, if others are playing at 60 fps and up.

 

[lukey94]

The human eye sees roughly at 24 frames per second, 30 is pretty close to this, so the movement seems only sightly more fluid at 30FPS. But 60FPS is the rough maximum for most TVs and monitors (usually in the 50-70 Hz range, but 3D at 120Hz) therefore at 60FPS you can get the most fluid movement and animation possible, if you watch The Slow-Mo Guys on Youtube, you can really see how fluid movement is at high FPS (talking thousands here) but the difference between 30 and 60 FPS is noticeable, so why wouldn't we want the best we can get?

 

[bafrali]

It runs smoother and increases the immersion. Why else?


If you are content with 30 FPS... you are probably a console player.

 

[Absolutionis]

Physicist/Biomedical Engineer here

Your eyes can see at ~24-30fps. In movies, this doesn't matter too much because any frame skips are generally ignored. For anything you have control over, the response lag between your action and the screen needs to be optimized; that's why they shoot for 30fps at least.

There's also something called "Nyquist Frequency" which essentially states that optimally, if you're displaying/detecting information, you should do so at TWICE the frequency of normal operation in order to minimize aliasing (aliasing in frequency, not the graphical aliasing you sometimes see).

In simpler terms, 30fps is fine. Anything less is noticeable by much of the population.
However, 40fps becomes odd in that the fps doesn't divide as evenly into the human 30fps detection rate.
Thus, we shoot for 60fps.
Anything higher than 60fps is a waste because it's more than double the human eye's rate.

 

[joshthor]

it really depends on the game. for instance - crysis i found to be smooth as low as 25 frames per second, but i find league of legends to seem laggy under 45.

that being said, my sweet spot is 45 fps. its hard to notice a difference after that. Skyrim i pumped up the graphics as much as possible until i had an average of about 45 fps. you will hit 60 alot, and usually drop no lower than 30.

 

[The Heik]

Yeah, some of the combos are insanely tight in that game, you'd never pull them off at 30FPS.

I call bullshit on this statement.

At 30 FPS, there is .03 seconds between each frame. At 60 FPS there are .0167 seconds between frames. That's already a pretty miniscule difference, but it's made all the more irrelevant mechanically by the fact that the world's fastest human reaction times are .100 seconds, 6 times slower than the frametime at 60 FPS. If the the difference between 30 and 60 FPS is a workable amount for you, then congratulations you're officially superhuman, but no regular member of the homo sapiens species could actually utilize such a meager amount of time with any significant measurable difference in player capability.

Which would be a valid criticism if combos were down to individual frames, which they're not.

Actually they are, as ultimately all interactions are based upon the frames (which are each continuations of the game). Can't pull off a combo if there are no frames to progress the action.

My point though is that having 60 FPS over 30FPS does not add enough additional data data for even the fastest human brains to actually use. Knowing that a hadouken fireball is coming .0167 seconds faster is not going to measurably help in combat, because it still takes your brain at least .1 seconds (though on average it's more like .2) to be able to recognize it and react to it. Ergo, a higher frame rate does not mechanically change the game after 30-40 FPS. If it does for you, then it's probably just a mental placebo, not an actual tactical advantage.

That's not how it works in terms of the whole system. A very finely tuned 60fps game has around 66ms of input latency while solid 30fps has twice that although it often goes up to over 200ms if the engine is not tuned and the hdtv is laggy or whatever.

And also in fighting games losing every other frame of animation is losing a lot of data about what is happening. Is this move x or move y, how obvious is the difference and so on. With 60fps developers can convey the same amount of visual information to the player in a shorter amount of time making action games feel a lot faster.

On your first point, you're arguing on an individual basis, which is hardly an objective point of reference. Of course a well tuned machine is going to function better than one that isn't. However, if both a 30 FPS system and a 60 FPS system are well tuned, the difference is negligible at best.

On your second point, like I mentioned before, .0167 seconds is not enough for the human brain to work with. By the time the information has been processed and reacted upon, 6 or more frames have already passed by, and that's at the very best speed humanity can offer (a trait that exists in less than .1% of the population). To say that a single frame lends so much information to a game is arguing against a fundamental physical limit of the human body. There is no one on Earth, past or present, who could properly use such a miniscule difference to any significant result.

And besides, if a game (ostensibly a form of entertainment) requires that players be the pinnacle of human mental capability to to be able to play properly, I'd chalk that up more to unfeasible game design rather than a lack of information.

So let me say again, no one needs faster than 40 frames per second for their games. 60 FPS does add to the visual smoothness, but in terms of actual actions and reaction, no one is going to be able to use what little is gained from the increase in FPS.

 

[Daemonate]

Quote: "To have a *perfect* illusion of everything that can flash, blink and move you shouldn't go below 500 fps....maybe you need as much as 4000fps..."(from link below).

The idea that you can't see more than xx fps so why get more, is an old myth, and a very confused one. It steps up when you need very quick and accurate visual responses - say competitive online FPS play, or flight simulators. I know when I was in a national team for a couple of shooters, the difference between 85 fps and 120 fps could be difference between defeat and victory. The improvement in accuracy was huge! So we'd play at 800x600 with all settings on Lowest, no matter how good our card was. Photographers can tell you that they can see strobe flashes of 1/1000th of a secnd.

The answer is a very long technical dissertation involving many aspects of video and biology.

Short answer: Cinema and computer screens are not the same thing. Even in cinema, there are theoretical gains in viewability up to 48 FPS and maybe beyond, but it's true that most movies look totally fine at 24 fps or even lower. But a modern film projector is actually showing 3 real frames for every 1 apparent frame, with interleaved blackness to hide projector motion, so they're actually closer to 72 fps anyway.

But for computers, well, if you ever had an old CRT, you know the difference between a 60 Hz and 85 Hz refresh rate was astonishing, ergonomically.

From Dans Rutter's DansData site www.dansdata.com:
"If a CRT monitor screen's painted less often than about 75 times per second (refresh rate is measured in Hertz, or Hz), it'll seem to flicker, because there's not enough persistence in the phosphor to keep the screen illumination even from your point of view. You need a 75Hz or better refresh rate to eliminate the flicker.

TVs have a low frame rate - 25 frames per second for PAL, 30 frames per second for NTSC - but they get away with it because they use interlaced mode, scanning all of the odd numbered lines and then all of the even numbered ones, so a 25 frame per second refresh rate becomes a 50 "field" per second screen-painting rate.

Sure, only half of the screen's painted each time, but it's not the top half and then the bottom half - it's a Venetian-blind interleaved pattern, that means the whole thing looks pretty evenly illuminated. This, combined with the higher persistence phosphor, gives a decently flicker-free display.

And, of course, you usually watch TV from far enough away that the screen takes up less of your field of view than does your closely-viewed computer monitor. Smaller images seem to flicker less.

24 frame per second movies, on the other hand, get away with their low frame rate without looking painfully flickery because the whole frame's illuminated in one go each time. And LCD panels work the same way."

LCDs with video games are more complicated, because as the data stream from the video card is organised into lines of pixel states, not whole picture frames, you need to start to talk about things like flicker-rates and de-interlacing algorithms. But if you have ever played a game at 75 FPS and then tried it on your friends PC at 15 FPS, well, again you'd know the difference.

For a more in depth (but still introductory) discussion of the matter, this article, from where I obtained the opening quote:
http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm
is good. Basically, the more frames you can get there in a second, the better, but YMMV.

 

[veloper]

Physicist/Biomedical Engineer here

Your eyes can see at ~24-30fps. In movies, this doesn't matter too much because any frame skips are generally ignored. For anything you have control over, the response lag between your action and the screen needs to be optimized; that's why they shoot for 30fps at least.

There's also something called "Nyquist Frequency" which essentially states that optimally, if you're displaying/detecting information, you should do so at TWICE the frequency of normal operation in order to minimize aliasing (aliasing in frequency, not the graphical aliasing you sometimes see).

In simpler terms, 30fps is fine. Anything less is noticeable by much of the population.
However, 40fps becomes odd in that the fps doesn't divide as evenly into the human 30fps detection rate.
Thus, we shoot for 60fps.
Anything higher than 60fps is a waste because it's more than double the human eye's rate.

Grab an moderately old CRT monitor from the attic, or borrow someone's fancy 120hz gaming monitor then run a demo that let's you toggle the framerates with a keypress.

I tried this for myself. You can actually see the difference between 60hz and 90hz and 120 hz on a rendered rotating object.
If the program is interactive, like shooter than it's even more noticeable.
Theory sucks when the practice is different.

 

[Treblaine]

Ok, essentially, as I understand it, any frame-rate of about 10-20 or more is enough to provide an illusions of a moving picture. Indeed, movies and television have a framerate of 24 FPS, and no-one seems to find any problem with them being choppy or slow.

Because with GAMES you aren't merely trying to create the illusion of a small part of a picture moving, but have quick feedback to controls. You have taken an uninformed and simplistic view of both video games and cinematography.

In fact even 30 frames per second is inadequate for the illusion of motion with quick PANNING shots, that is where the whole frame moves you get "the judder". Cinephiles thought this "judder" was an artefact of films being converted from 24-frames to 60-hz Television but it is in fact inherent to the film. If you pan a camera swiftly at 24-frames per second the illusion of motion IS LOST! It only kinda works in two cases:

1) where the attention is on a character or object in the fore ground moving with the camera so it's relative position in the frame is not changing much they seem to move fluidly but around them the screen is clealry jeerking/juddering. Any game where you control the camera will be full of equivalent of "fast-panning-shots" and blurring is no solution.

2) blur. That is the ONLY SOLUTION to low framerate and this is UNACCEPTABLE to games. Ask any cinematographer who films in 24 frames per second, they HAVE to know how to reduce the aperture for filming things fast so that each frame showing something moving fast blurs it so that for example it doesn't look like a slide show of Bruce Lee's leg suddenly going from on the floor to fully raised, both frames ar eblurred together.

Bottom line: 24-frames-per-second ONLY WORKS (vaguely) for film because of BLURRING of fast moving things and doesn't work at all for fast panning shots. 24fps = illusion of motion is a MYTH!! It's not that simple.

PS: you have basically said all gamers are shallow fools for wanting 60fps and act like you know everything about something you clearly haven't done the bare basic research on. Bravo.

 

[Samurai Silhouette]

I put 5k$ into my computer and can run all games at 60fps and some at 120. Being a former console player, I find it no real advantage whatsoever.

 

[Thaliur]

Ok, essentially, as I understand it, any frame-rate of about 10-20 or more is enough to provide an illusions of a moving picture.

Technically, and in recorded or prerendered movies, yes.
The problem with real-time rendering is that it does not create motion artifacts, which we are used to. Normally, when you are looking wt the world with your eyes, movement is blurry, which your brain compensates. On a real-time-rendered scene, you get a series of pictures with no blurring connecting them (and the motion blur effect employed in many modern games does not get it right either). Because of this, the only way to get a "natural" picture is an extremely high framerate.

Framerates higher than the screen refresh rates are just ridiculous though. If your system generates 120 frames per second, and your monitor refreshes 60 times per second (a VGA-connected TFT screen, for example), you are just wasting half of your systems work cycles.

 

[Daemonate]

Physicist/Biomedical Engineer here

Your eyes can see at ~24-30fps. In movies, this doesn't matter too much because any frame skips are generally ignored. For anything you have control over, the response lag between your action and the screen needs to be optimized; that's why they shoot for 30fps at least.

There's also something called "Nyquist Frequency" which essentially states that optimally, if you're displaying/detecting information, you should do so at TWICE the frequency of normal operation in order to minimize aliasing (aliasing in frequency, not the graphical aliasing you sometimes see).

In simpler terms, 30fps is fine. Anything less is noticeable by much of the population.
However, 40fps becomes odd in that the fps doesn't divide as evenly into the human 30fps detection rate.
Thus, we shoot for 60fps.
Anything higher than 60fps is a waste because it's more than double the human eye's rate.

Sorry, but this is simply not accurate. Please see my post above.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

Yeah, some of the combos are insanely tight in that game, you'd never pull them off at 30FPS.

I call bullshit on this statement.

At 30 FPS, there is .03 seconds between each frame. At 60 FPS there are .0167 seconds between frames. That's already a pretty miniscule difference, but it's made all the more irrelevant mechanically by the fact that the world's fastest human reaction times are .100 seconds, 6 times slower than the frametime at 60 FPS. If the the difference between 30 and 60 FPS is a workable amount for you, then congratulations you're officially superhuman, but no regular member of the homo sapiens species could actually utilize such a meager amount of time with any significant measurable difference in player capability.

Which would be a valid criticism if combos were down to individual frames, which they're not.

Actually they are, as ultimately all interactions are based upon the frames (which are each continuations of the game). Can't pull off a combo if there are no frames to progress the action.

My point though is that having 60 FPS over 30FPS does not add enough additional data data for even the fastest human brains to actually use. Knowing that a hadouken fireball is coming .0167 seconds faster is not going to measurably help in combat, because it still takes your brain at least .1 seconds (though on average it's more like .2) to be able to recognize it and react to it. Ergo, a higher frame rate does not mechanically change the game after 30-40 FPS. If it does for you, then it's probably just a mental placebo, not an actual tactical advantage.

There are places in maps you can only get to in CoD 2 if your fps is 333 or above so yes in games higher FPS does make a difference.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Because some people have higher standards then others, if you are the sort of person who does not mind slow response on games then this clearly will not bother you.

But it bothers others because:
- our eyes actually see an infinite amount of frames
- time between frames adds lag on input and output
- added lag increases overall response time and the game starts to feel disconnected