Frames per second

[endtherapture]

How much FPS can the human eye see?

What FPS is considered "ideal" for gaming?

Do you care as long as your fps isn't like a powerpoint presentation?

 

[thesilentman]

Technically, you can see an infinite number of frames, but it's really hard to tell the exact number. I can see higher than 60, but I personally I don't care as long as it's above 24 and it's fluid along with being consistent.

 

[shrekfan246]

Oh come on, you know how this thread is going to end.

Fine, I'll help start it off, you've already got "On Fire" anyway.

The human eye doesn't see in FPS, and therefore it's impossible to calculate "how much" it can see, and it varies on a person-to-person basis. Personally, I can easily spot the difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS, and I can moderately spot the difference between 60 FPS and 120 FPS. 15-25 FPS mostly looks the same to me, and with proper use of motion blurring a steady 25 FPS appears much the same as 30 FPS. I can't really notice the difference between 45 FPS and 60 FPS, though, unless the game's responsiveness is impacted by the lower framerate.

What is "ideal" is also a personal basis. I can live with 25 FPS, but my "ideal" would be 45+ as long as it's steady and not jumping up and down constantly. I believe that anything more than 60 FPS is a bit excessive, though, because there is a point where the smoothness of motion passes a point of 'realistic' expectations and appears too smooth; Partially because game animations are still in the uncanny valley.

If you couldn't tell from the above, I don't particularly care what the framerate of a game is. If it's constantly dropping like in Assassin's Creed III, I'm going to get angry. But, while it might annoy me slightly, I can play something just fine between 20-30 FPS so long as it's steady. I played World of Warcraft for three years getting only 3 FPS in most dungeons and raids.

 

[Dark5tar1]

I think it's 60 FPS, I can't notice anything higher at 60.
30 to 60 FPS is my preferred stance but there are some exceptions like SoD. Frame-rate is shitty but game is too fun.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Oh come on, you know how this thread is going to end.

Fine, I'll help start it off, you've already got "On Fire" anyway.

The human eye doesn't see in FPS, and therefore it's impossible to calculate "how much" it can see, and it varies on a person-to-person basis. Personally, I can easily spot the difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS, and I can moderately spot the difference between 60 FPS and 120 FPS. 15-25 FPS mostly looks the same to me, and with proper use of motion blurring a steady 25 FPS appears much the same as 30 FPS. I can't really notice the difference between 45 FPS and 60 FPS, though, unless the game's responsiveness is impacted by the lower framerate.

What is "ideal" is also a personal basis. I can live with 25 FPS, but my "ideal" would be 45+ as long as it's steady and not jumping up and down constantly. I believe that anything more than 60 FPS is a bit excessive, though, because there is a point where the smoothness of motion passes a point of 'realistic' expectations and appears too smooth; Partially because game animations are still in the uncanny valley.

If you couldn't tell from the above, I don't particularly care what the framerate of a game is. If it's constantly dropping like in Assassin's Creed III, I'm going to get angry. But, while it might annoy me slightly, I can play something just fine between 20-30 FPS so long as it's steady. I played World of Warcraft for three years getting only 3 FPS in most dungeons and raids.

boom this.

also, i agree with your "too smooth" notion, watching movies on my friends tv gets VERY annoying because everything looks too good (120 hz big ass nice tv with top of the line blu ray player, while i'm used to standard tv with dvds...) so i'm constantly gettmy my immersion broken because everything looks too fucking good.

 

[endtherapture]

I can personally play with 20-30 fps but obviously I'd prefer more.

I was just on a Skyrim mod video, he was complaining of the "noticeable" slowdown on an ENB mod he was using which took it down from 70fps to like 50fps or something...and wanted to discuss whether he could even notice it or was just being all elitist?

 

[Vegosiux]

I'll personally say that anything above your monitor's refresh rate is not really feasible. If your monitor refreshes at 60Hz, you're not going to see more than 60 different frames each second anyway.

As long as I don't notice any stuttering in the picture, it's all good with me though I suppose. I don't buy into the entire "game responsiveness" thing, because those miniscule amounts of time are well within any margin of error.

 

[Bostur]

I can't see the difference between 30 and 60 FPS in a game, but I can most certainly feel it due to control lag. It depends on the game though, FPS is much more important in a 3D game than in a 2D game for instance. On old CRT monitors I could very easily tell the difference between 60Hz and 85 Hz refresh rates, the latter looked much sharper.

For me a stable frame rate is more important than a high one. a game that constantly varies between 40-60 is worse than one running at a stable 30.

I guess the ideal framerate is as high as your monitor will show it, while at the same time being stable. Although I suppose having higher FPS than can physically be shown can be useful to reduce lag from input devices.

 

[Doom972]

Anything between 40 and 60 seems fine to me. Less than 40 is choppy and more than 60 causes tearing and then I have to use FPS limit or V-sync.

 

[LAGG]

Disclamer: the following comment is NOT based on scienctific experiments but observation and speculation. We don't have data that says otherwise anyway...

I believe the correct question is "how many FPS can the human brain see?", unless you close one eye, then the brain can only what that eye sees, yet the brain still controls the eye and can tweak the focus for the task at hand.

Actually it depends on many factors, most experiements are under "normal circunstances" where people just have to tell from two big screens which one has the most FPS. A lot of people can't tell th difference between 60 and 120 FPS, until they need to and something important is at stake.

Having player competitive games for a long while my personal experience is that, the more you need the more you see.

When playing against very tough teams and behind in the score, the difference between 120 and 160 becomes clear to the eye and your brain start to collect an analyze an insane amount of information, suddenly you can see a shadow in a split-second and tell which team it is and which weapon it has when the exact possition they are. But not until you've been pushed hard to that mind state.

Another example is when playing (or even watching) a fast game in 1.5x or 2.0x of the normal speed of the game. After like 10 minutes you see that as the normal speed and can tell everything that's going on normally, but switching back to the normal speed will make you see the game as it's in slowmotion. Actually, not in an elitism/bragging "oh it's so slow now" way, you do see it in slowmotion, do a test. And if your fps wasn't very great in the first place, after speeding the game up you'll notice how much it's skipping animations and give you incomplete information of what's going on.

Edit: another thing is, the eye is an organical device, it's not designed around the FPS concept of replacing frames methodically and sequencially. Also having studyied photography, I'm more inclined to believe the eye sees like this (first transition "displacement"):

 

[Christopher Fisher]

After having played games primarily on PC for the last few years, I simply could never go back to console standards (ie 30fps or lower). I'd take a slight reduction in visuals for 60fps any day of the week. 30fps is for barbarians.

 

[TrevHead]

It depends on the game, the faster the game the more noticeable it is. That's why WipeOut has always been 60FPS.

That's why mouse controlled FPS games need to be 60FPS more than an analog controlled FPS because of the higher sensitivity.

Although imo controller & TV lag is more important but this tends to always be ignored or only tighted up that it's "just" good enough for most ppl. And with the "cloud" coming in a big way next gen I can only see lag getting worse.

 

[LAGG]

It depends on the game, the faster the game the more noticeable it is. That's why WipeOut has always been 60FPS.

That's why mouse controlled FPS games need to be 60FPS more than an analog controlled FPS because of the higher sensitivity.

Yep Good framerate, mouse, and multiple energy drinks ^^
How else will stuff like this be possible:

 

[BrotherRool]

Your TV/computer screen is also a hard limit on FPS. Normal tv's and monitors refresh at 60 frames per second, so even if your game is outputting 80FPS, the actual screen is still only showing you 60.

120FPS screens are coming in now. But even then it has to be a clean multiple for an even refresh rate. That's why developers aim for 30 or 60. If you game runs at 49FPS then it every second some part of the animation is smoother than others. The screen has sixty ticks so either a frame fits in with that tick or it has to wait for the next one and piles up with the next frame


EDIT: Wikipedia answers this pretty well anyway
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate

Your eye can process 10-12 individual images in a second. But your eye can pick on a 16 millisecond dark period (like those awful flickering lights they use in schools)

You can pick up on an image that last only one thousandth of a second, but to your brain it appears to last up to a 10th or almost 2/5ths of a second.

One of the big things is that games don't have motion blurring, our eye always receives a fuzzy image of lots of positions at once because it doesn't process the image fast enough to notice the small changes in time, whereas videogames present two different discrete images which causes the brain more problems. I guess films motion blur, because films run at 24FPS

 

[Samurai Silhouette]

Your eyes can detect motion depending on, how fast the light that entered your eyes, the information from your eyes through your optical nerves, and how fast your brain can process that information. But since there's a continuous flow of information and since everyone's different, it's not going to be the same answer for everyone.

 

[DoPo]

I was just on a Skyrim mod video, he was complaining of the "noticeable" slowdown on an ENB mod he was using which took it down from 70fps to like 50fps or something...and wanted to discuss whether he could even notice it or was just being all elitist?

Yes, it is entirely feasible he could notice. Whether he did or not is another matter entirely - he could have been just talking out his ass, however, a drop in framerate could be noticeable to a trained eye. it's been a while since I've played a lot of games and at high FPS each, so nowadays I might not notice if the FPS drops from 70 to 50 but back in the day I could. Now, that's not to say I knew exactly what the drop was but I'd notice it and maybe 5 or 10 would be too small for me to pickup on but 15-20 would be recognisable. Well, not every time, of course but at that framerate it'd be possible, if, however, it fell from 170 to 150, then I wouldn't and couldn't notice.

 

[lacktheknack]

I read that it's not possible to distinguish above 100 FPS. I tend to stop noticing around 80, or 60 if I'm actually doing something.

I prefer 60+, but I can work with as low as 25 if need be.

 

[ChampionMan]

As already said before, anywhere between 30-60 is fine for a game. Anything less begins to affect quick reactions and anything more just makes everything look... off.

I'm not too picky about having max FPS in every situation.

 

[Exius Xavarus]

I can't really tell that much of a difference between 30-60, so I'm just fine with 30. As long as the picture's nice and fluid, s'all good.