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Originally posted by Kac
As far as framerate goes, I'd guess between 130-200. If you've ever played the game Counter-Strike or another 3D Action game, you know that 60 FPS is UNBEARABLE. When I hit my 100 FPS max, its like I'm in heaven. I'd think our eyes could go above this.
sigh, I'm going to find a better source that can explain what I'm saying, but this has a pretty good explaination.
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Ok first of all make sure that you know the difference between refresh rate and frame rate since both are different. The human eye is unable to see the difference between more than 30 fps but the human eye is much more sensitive for changes in intensity : flickering of a screen. For this reason the refresh rate is usually much higher. The refresh rate is how often the electron beam writes the image to the screen (electron beam hits phosphor layer, phosphor layer lights up and then decays, ...). With television 25 or 30 different images are shown per second, the refresh rate however is the double : 50 Hz or 60 Hz. The refresh rate has to be higher in bright rooms then in dark rooms, monitors are in bright well-lit offices and cinema is played in a rather dark room. This means that computer monitors are running at at least 60 Hz while the movies run only at 48 Hz ( each image is shown twice, 24 fps ).There actually is another trick involved : interlacing. Television doesn't write the whole image in one go it writes the odd lines first and in the next pass it writes the even lines and this changes constantly. This trick is used to limit the bandwidth needed (only half needed compared to full screen resolution ! ). This means that the image is written at the double speed ( 50 or 60 Hz) but each time only half of it : so first pass the odd lines are written, the next pass the even lines are written to the screen, that way a full new frame is written every two passes of the electron beam ( 25 or 30 Hz ) . You could say that 50/60 half-frames are written each second and 25/30 full-frames are written each second. By now you are probably wondering why I always write 25/30 and 50/60... well the European system has a higher resolution but a lower frame rate of 25, the American NTSC ( = Never The Same Colour ; ) system runs at a lower resolution but displays 30 frames per second. There are other differences but that is not the subject of this article.
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Does this mean that more than 30 fps is useless ?
Well no... the important words in the conclusion is : ...see the difference between... The human eye can not see the difference, this means that if you display 60 different frames per second you can only see the difference between half of them. You can understand it like this : the first image is written to the monitor. Now our eyes and brain start to study that image... But the new image appears way to fast for our brain... the result is that this second image is combined with the first one. You could say that the first two frames are blended together by our brain. The third and fourth image are also blended together and so on. Now the effect of this is similar to what we know as motion blur : when you quickly move your hand in front of your eyes it looks like several copies of your hand are chasing each other. The effect is the same : your hand moves so fast that our brain can not follow it : so while interpreting one frame (position of the hand) a new one is physically created... so what does the brain do : it mixes the various positions and the results is several positions of your hand blurred together. Important to know is that the eye and brain are not scan line based, so our brain doesn't start at the top left and moves zigzag to the bottom like a television or monitor (motion of the electron beam)... if the brain would work like that we would suffer from tearing ;) ( Tearing is when only part of the image is updated ) How eyes and brain actually work together... well bit of a mystery.. lets say : it just works ...
So when your game is running at 60 fps or more you will get some kind of limited motion blur effect through several frames that are blended together by our brain. This effect is very similar to what happens in nature and that is why so many people claim that a game running at 60 fps looks/feels better than that same game running at just 30 fps.
