[...]Framerates Matter « Significant Bits[...]…

[...]Framerates Matter « Significant Bits[...]…

I got a 120 fps HDTV because it is better than 60, but virtually all content is at 59.97 and doesn’t really benefit other than what post processing happens in the set.

The effects of frame rate and resolution on users playing first person shooter games
Claypool, Mark | Claypool, Kajal | Damaa, Feissal
Proceedings of SPIE. Vol. SPIE-6071, pp. 1-11. 2006

The author’s conclusion:

“Contrary to previous results for streaming video, frame rate has a marked impact on both player performance and game enjoyment while resolution has little impact on performance and some impact on enjoyment. “

——
1). Granularity

The framerate of a game is usually directly tied to the processing of its logic. As a result, action games that run at 30fps cannot have the same granularity of movement as those that run at 60fps. This might not matter much for turn-based strategy titles, but it makes an awful lot of shmups technically impossible to do at lower framerates.
——

You saved yourself here by not saying that all games ties there logic directly to the fps. Most games separates rendering and logic.
The logic (game updates, physics and such), is commonly run frame independent in such a way that even if the rendering slow down to a crawl it will still perform okay.
(If you don’t do this your physics are bound to blow up once in a while, and thats look real bad).

For a simple introduction look at:
http://gafferongames.com/game-physics/fix-your-timestep/
(note: this is a introduction and is in no way a ultimate solution for all timestep problems, im also not in any way affiliated with gafferongames.com :) )

The objective for digital systems interacting with the analog world is to determine how fast digital computation must run (framerate) to “appear” to be continuous. The article correctly points out that humans are analog devices. So, how fast does a digital computer have to perform human oriented tasks, such as respond to a key stroke or display a new scene, to cause the human to believe that it is continuous. Since the discussion is focused on vision, lets look at that. Other posters point out that angular acuity is limited to about 1 arc second. If an object moves less than 1 arc second, the average human won’t perceive it as having moved. The motion picture and TV industries discovered that if they presented a sequence of images a 24-30Hz most humans would perceive it as a continuous sequence with no apparent steps. This is due, in part, to saccadic masking and in part to neurologic processing. Admittedly this is a lower limit to save on media, in the case of film, and bandwidth in the case of TV. Even so, most people don’t complain even when presented with detail rich scenes (check out Avatar). The Nyquist rate for the vast majority of humans is likely less than 60Hz so that number might make better sense than 30Hz.

Higher framerates and, more importantly, multithreading, are very valuable in gaming and simulation. But, using resources to present images humans will tend to discard is a waste. Better to use resources to improve the scene content to help the human viewer suspend disbelief.

Theory is nice but empirical measurement paired with human reporting would be an interesting set of studies.

Maybe it’s because I don’t play a lot of fighters, and don’t care for many FPS’s (the most mainstream, creatively bankrupt, and ironically popular, genre there is), but 30fps – and 30fps LOCKED, which is often the case these days – is more than enough for smooth presentation and responsive input. Techies love to bring up input, but I’ve never encountered an error in a game due to me hitting a button and it not registering fast enough. I suppose if you bought a computer to play something like UT3, then you care about that kinda stuff, but how much is an internet connection to blame in that example, and not the rendering code of the game?

Framerates ARE important, but we’re at a pretty ideal place right now. How many games, honestly, in 2009 ran at around 20 fps? Seriously? 30 fps is fine; 60 is great but it shouldn’t be some kind of goal in expense of some other content, or polish. Just like Insomniac, who recently mandated that they were going to stop pursuing 60 fps in their games. It’s silly to think that it’s that much of a big deal over a rock solid 30.

That’s why the article was good; it wasn’t about that, it was just about why framerates were important. And it’s a very successful article right there.