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Can you tell apart the frame rates?

Can you see a difference between 30 and 60 fps?  

110 members have voted

  1. 1. Can you see a difference between 30 and 60 fps?

    • I see no difference
      19
    • I see a minor difference in smoothness
      47
    • I see a major difference in smoothness
      44


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Not even close, ill just post this link here because it explains everything pretty well. Only thing i would add to it is that eyes/brain adjust to the framerate. If i make you play a game for 3 hours straight with 15FPS your eyes/brain will eventually adjust to it and it wont feel as choppy. However, if the FPS goes up to 25 for a few seconds it will take a long time to get adjusted to the horribly low 15 again, which is why stability is so important. However if you played at 60 for a few minutes and get drops to 25 it will feel choppy.

Interesting link, but I would take exception to the assumption taken from this factoid:

We know that the limit is beyond 220fps because the USAF used to test pilots by flashing an image of a plane in front of them for 1/220th of a second. The pilots would then have to identify the plane. They actually did quite well.

I would say that just because a single image might be percieved at 1/220th second, that the conclusion must be that we can percieve 220 fps, is a flawed one. I think there is a difference in percieving imagery vs percieving movement.

However, I fully agree with the 15 fps vs 30 fps etc, my own experience is that it's entirely context driven. I don't notice 15 fps until I need to shoot a unit who's moving across the view in a scope, for some reason I'm able to completely blank out low fps under just about any other situation. :)

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Are you sure there might not be anything else effecting your view on that, such as the distances or again, the placebo effect of knowing its at 60fps?

Yes, and I'll tell you why. When shell casings come out of the wings of an aircraft many at a time, and the distance between the shells is less than the distance that they move per frame, there's no continuity of motion between shells. Did that particular shell tumble a bit to the left or a bit to the right? I don't know, because that could be either of 4 shells falling out of the side of the aircraft at that instant, plus any of the others that occupying a similar space by virtue of the fact that the aircraft is spewing out fifty six shell casings per second on that side, or 2 per frame. If the distance the shells move per frame is less than the distance between shells, you don't get so confused, and you can track each shell casing.

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Yes, and I'll tell you why. When shell casings come out of the wings of an aircraft many at a time, and the distance between the shells is less than the distance that they move per frame, there's no continuity of motion between shells. Did that particular shell tumble a bit to the left or a bit to the right? I don't know, because that could be either of 4 shells falling out of the side of the aircraft at that instant, plus any of the others that occupying a similar space by virtue of the fact that the aircraft is spewing out fifty six shell casings per second on that side, or 2 per frame. If the distance the shells move per frame is less than the distance between shells, you don't get so confused, and you can track each shell casing.
What?does?this?words?say? For sure it is written in good language but I can't find the point in beetween the words.

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I was responding to a response to a statement I made regarding il2. You can probably figure out what it means by clicking the little arrow beside the quotes and going back a few replies.

If you're still stuck after that, consider this:

jQDjJRYmeWg

Okay, this film was captured at the same frame rate as the rotational rate of the rotor blades... or some fraction thereof, like 2 times the rotation rate or perhaps 1/5th... You don't know which blade you're see in each frame because you can't tell the difference between them. You can't track the motion of the blades. How fast are they spinning? I mean, if you know anything about aerodynamics, you can guess which direction they're spinning, but nothing in the image is telling you how fast they are going.

Now, if you have a bunch of identical items being tossed out into a stream of raining items, and their paths are all crossing each other and they're tumbling at random, without a sufficient frame rate you can't tell which shell is going where, so it all just looks like a cloud, like a particle effect. If the distance an item travels is less then the distance interval between items, you don't have sufficient context to tell the difference between items as they fall. They all just get mixed up. It's an example of visual aliasing... resolution problems in the dimension of time.

Edited by Max Power

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I would say that just because a single image might be percieved at 1/220th second, that the conclusion must be that we can percieve 220 fps, is a flawed one. I think there is a difference in percieving imagery vs percieving movement.

Yeah this site is basically a rewritten version of the one i actually looked for, and that one was slightly less eager to jump to conclusions, and also longer. I agree with you though, the difference between two frames with 220fps would be so small that its much harder to percieve that 2 different ones are actually played, compared to that test where they compared seeing nothing and then recognizing 1 frame.

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The reason why films look smoother than games at the same framerates is because of the way cameras record images. In games, each individual frame is a snapshot of a single, infinitely short point in time. With cameras, each frame actually captures a certain timespan, for example 1/24 seconds. If an object moves fast in front of a camera, each frame contains visual information on the movement of the object for the duration of each frame, resulting in motion blur. Not so in games, where each frame simply shows the object exactly where it was at the moment the frame was rendered.

If games could render a scene as if it were being captured by a camera, a smooth 24 fps would probably be enough for everyone. Artificial motion blur is a step in the right direction, but so far no game does it consistently enough.

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If games could render a scene as if it were being captured by a camera, a smooth 24 fps would probably be enough for everyone. Artificial motion blur is a step in the right direction, but so far no game does it consistently enough.

I'm pretty sure it would only result in motion sickness, eye strain and the like. When you're directly controlling what happens on the screen, blurring makes you miss a lot of visual cues you'd otherwise see.

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Movies already have it built in... and cg in movies has it.. why do you think it would cause eye strain?

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Movies already have it built in... and cg in movies has it.. why do you think it would cause eye strain?

Because you are a passive observer in movies. The progress of a movie doesn't depend on how well you pick up visual cues and react to them.

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Because you are a passive observer in movies. The progress of a movie doesn't depend on how well you pick up visual cues and react to them.

That doesn't make any sense to me. ArmA 2 is blurred ten ways from Sunday and there's no appreciable eyestrain. The blue is even frame rate dependent, so if you're not getting a high enough frame rate, things tend to get severely over-blurred.

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That doesn't make any sense to me. ArmA 2 is blurred ten ways from Sunday and there's no appreciable eyestrain. The blue is even frame rate dependent, so if you're not getting a high enough frame rate, things tend to get severely over-blurred.

My Arma 2 isn't blurred because otherwise I get eyestrain. Even if it didn't affect me, I'd keep it off simply to see things clearly.

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There are good and bad ways to do it.

Much of the blur in Arma2 is completely overdone in my opinion. Especially depth-of-field is simething that should only be used for effect in cinematics, not during normal gameplay. The only exception being objects that are extremely close to the face, for example the butt of your rifle when you're looking down ironsights. Having the landscape blur in the distance just feels wrong.

As for the motion blur when rotating the camera, I quite like it - on my computer. I've seen it on a friends computer and it just looked horrible, even though his framerates are generally the same as mine. No idea what's going on there.

In any case, it could always be toned down a bit for rotation. The thing motion blur would really be needed for is for fast object movement.

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This jumping box is just a simple example. It becomes something different with games. Console games are set at 30 fps, but is considerd smooth because those games use low resolution textures and graphics, no AA and excesive blooming and blurring. 30 Fps in PC games is considered choppy because those games use high resolutions and AA. So running CODMW2 at 30 fps is smooth, but running ArmA2 at 30 fps is not very enjoyable.;)

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MW2 and all other COD games are made to run at 60 FPS on consoles.

I'm perfectly fine running ARMA 2 at a framerate below 30 so long as it doesn't go below 15.

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I think the key is consistancy. If there's any slow down, it's suddenly very noticeable, but as long as it stays the same your brain accepts it as smooth.

Some interesting reading here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate

MW2 and all other COD games are made to run at 60 FPS on consoles.

I'm perfectly fine running ARMA 2 at a framerate below 30 so long as it doesn't go below 15.

Actually consoles are capped at 30 fps.

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No, they aren't. Who told you that? Activision recently said itself that the 60 FPS that Call of Duty games runs at on consoles "gives it the edge". Besides that, I own a PS3 and can say for certain that MW2 runs at 60 FPS on it.

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http://www.boallen.com/fps-compare.html

Make sure that all boxes read "fps ok" and compare the 30 and 60 fps animations. Can you see a difference in their smoothness?

I can't but if you gave me control of the mouse, in a 3D enviroment I could.

That game with the cube would probably work fine on 10 FPS.

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60fps is good enough in any game aslong as its constant!

I can notice a slight difference in the 30fps and 60fps demo overall feels alot more fluid to my eye.

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The 30FPS limit of the eyes is not a myth, it is a fact. But you can't apply this fact on computer generated graphics.

Whenever a frame is calculated, the objects in the scene do have an exact position for this frame, regardless if it's moving or not. The computer renders the frame according to these momentary static informations.

But this is not how the eye works "in nature". If a object moves, well, it moves. Our eyes won't take the picture of a split nanosecond so it would resemble a computer generated scene. The movement causes motion blur which we are used to see since we opened our eyes. This is what the brain expect to see on a moving object.

According to this, our brain tries to interpret what the eyes see on the computerscreen and it realises: somethings wrong. Something is missing.

At the moment you would add visual correct rendered motion blur, this would be the moment where you couldn't differ between 30 or 60 FPS.

Would be nice if someone would have a camera which has a shutter that could be set to very short opening times, like 1/4000s. If someone could make some real life footage with these shutter settings and some relatively long settings like 1/30s, that would be interesting to see.

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No, they aren't. Who told you that? Activision recently said itself that the 60 FPS that Call of Duty games runs at on consoles "gives it the edge". Besides that, I own a PS3 and can say for certain that MW2 runs at 60 FPS on it.

Yes and Activision is known for being thruthfull all the time.:j:

It's BS. There is no noticeble difference between 30 and 60 fps on console shooters because games like MW2 and Halo 3 are set at 720p/30 fps. DICE recently announced Battlefield 3 on consoles is set to 720p/30 fps because apparantly they can't get all that supposedly "splendour" like soldiers,vehicles and planes to run smooth at 60 fps.

I found an interesting read. http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/fr-rez/paper.pdf

One sentence caught my eye. It reads "PC gamers will often tune the display options for their games in an

ad-hoc fashion until the game “feels†right. Console gamers and hand-held gamers typically do not have such an option,

but instead rely upon the settings the designers chose when building the game and gaming platform.";)

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Unless you can provide proof stating that all console games are locked at 30 FPS, they are not. I have a console, I've played many games on that console, and many of them run at 60 FPS. The Call of Duty games are specifically engineered to run at 60 FPS on consoles, but DICE are not afraid to have the better looking game but have it run at 30 FPS. And yes, there is a huge difference for me between playing, say, MW2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on my PS3 at 720p.

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The difference between the 30fps and 60fps is noticeable.

In games I find the differences between fps even more noticeable since you can "feel" it when moving around, there is a lack of precision/control. If that makes any sense.

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Yes I can see a clear difference. In ArmA 2 you can feel it before you see it though, kinda like the force I guess :D

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