The reason they sell monitors at 144FPS and now 256FPs is because people can see and react that fast.
Sure those are generally for video games. But pretending <Xms is the end-all-be-all of human perception is arrogant.
Sure those are generally for video games. But pretending <Xms is the end-all-be-all of human perception is arrogant.
You could likely data mine from stat sites before before/after purchasing very high refresh rate monitors.
OFC there maybe some bias to try harder once you drop >$400 on a hobby. In my own subjective experience 60 -> 144FPS was night and day. Roughtly ended up being a 50% pref improvement.
280 frames/sec is about 3.5 ms/frame. Signals don't even leave the retina that fast, let alone propagate to brain areas linked to perception and action.
Perhaps the higher frame rate makes the motion smoother, which allows the pilot to estimate and extrapolate an objects' motion more accurately, or something like that.
Moving a cursor horizontally across a 4k display in a relatively slow one second is 64 pixels per frame at 60Hz, which is significantly wider than the cursor itself. At 144Hz it's about 26 pixels per frame, and at 280Hz it would be about 14 pixels per frame.
Even if you have a low-persistence display, you need to have a pretty high refresh rate to draw smooth motion. Hardly anything needs to be animated all the way down at 1 pixel per frame, but hardly anything currently comes at all close to that ideal strobe-free smoothness.
I'm legitimately curious, since I've never heard anything like that.
I don't think a fighter pilot inheriently react faster because of the resolution, but he is trained to detect motion in his peripheral vision. Perhaps he notice the smooth motion more than people who rarely train that part of their visual system. It would be interested to see how a trained and experience hunter would compare, as they often use peripheral vision as well.
The nervous system is pretty slow. Each action potential takes about a millisecond, and is followed a refractory period of another 1-2 milliseconds or so. This limits the speed of transmission in the nervous system generally.
The visual system, specifically, is even slower. There's a fairly complicated electrochemical cascade that turns photons into electrical impulses in rods and cones, and it's not fast. Drum (1982) describes several attempts at measuring the latencies of cones. The exact value depends on several factors like adaption levels and the visual stimuli, but they're all in the tens of milliseconds.
Are you saying that the rods and cones only "sample" every so often?
Yes, in that phototransduction is a sluggish chemical process. The impulse-response functions of photoreceptors are pretty well-known (e.g, Figure 1 here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1189952/?page=5). The tiny square wave at the bottom is the visual stimulation; the other traces are the responses of individual photoreceptors.
Figure 4 of the paper (p. 689) shows the response to a pair of flashes. In the bottom-most trace, you can see that the photoreceptor "misses" the second visual stimulus because the responses evoked by the first and second stimuli overlap in time and interfere.
I'd say that the visual system does get a continuous stream of inputs, but its output is low-pass filtered (and clipped, rectified, etc) so that faster inputs are not always reflected in its output.
It is indeed an interesting topic, thanks for the pointers.
My subjective results were somewhere in between the values you have as an example. I stopped noticing significant difference somewhere north of 160Hz, and at 200Hz they were barely perceptible.
Very interesting to hear that someone has actually been measuring this in a more controlled way than I did some 18 years ago.
It's also quite interesting how reluctant people are to even acknowledge the existence of something they themselves haven't noticed. Almost everyone refuted my eye witness account simply because they had read/heard that they eye can only notice <some number between 20-60> frames per secobd, and thus I couldn't possibly see any difference in motion above that threshold.
Did you notice how movies always look smooth at 24 FPS while games tend to look horrible at the same frame rate? That's because unlike with real cameras, games render frames with a zero exposure time (no motion blur). You can also call it time aliasing. Modern 3D engines use tricks to alleviate the problem it is far from perfect.
The result is that you need a much faster framerate than what is normally perceivable in order for fast-paced games to look smooth.
As for latency, even at 60FPS, the resulting 16.7ms is well under human reaction time. It matter in competitive gaming because what matters is not your gaming experience but how faster you are than your opponent.
Also note that VR has its own set of problems and requires even faster refresh rates and lower latencies. That's because the brain coordinates vision and head movement and any discrepancy feels weird.
One or two years later, It turns out because human uses both our eyes for vision, we need double the frame rate, 60fps is the key and limit of human perception. All First Person Shooter should try and hit 60Fps. That was the era of Doom, Half Life, and Counter Strike.
60Fps settled for a long time. No one were discussing any thing more. ( Or we did but we stay at 60fps, Doom 3 even try to cap the frame rate at 60. ) We needed 120Fps or more for AR for an immersive experience, but i thought that was only for AR.
The iPad Pro 's 120Hz screen, it really was similar to when i first saw and use Retina Screen. The wow factor. For a long time I thought 60Fps was enough. And the sluggish of Computer UI was all software problem.
The conclusion is, we may, or may not be able to react to 120fps timing. But we do definitely feel the difference. And as a matter of fact, after knowing it is a frame rate problem, you can see how 120fps is still not quite enough. It is like the early days of Retina 330ppi Smartphone screen, It is not quite up to imperceivable difference yet. A lot of people may not agree this latency, slight sluggishness matters, ( The early days of Android users dont think it is problem ) but i like where all these direction are going, latency is now taking a front seat for optimization.
Competitive games have long been running full speed, not locked to the screen refresh because of the latency in screens. You don't want to wait for the screen to display something that is already ancient history.
(In Quake 2 you could jump higher if your computer could run more than 200 fps so it was popular to look down on the ground before jumping up on crates for a while.)
But the thing that's most visible to me personally when comparing 30 Hz vs. 60 Hz is not so much latency, but the smoothness of quick movements (e.g. when you turn the camera really fast). Mighty be different for a serious FPS gamer, though; I mostly play Minecraft, only.
Next screen I buy will be something higher but right now I'm back at 60 Hz with an IPS screen and I'm not totally happy with the flickering. Haven't tried overclocking yet, thought the flatscreens were locked to a certain Hz.