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Comment by TwoBit | Hacker News Reader

Monitor resolution and frame rate inflation seem to have endpoints at 4K or 8K and 144Hz. Scene detail still has some way to go before diminishing returns and so that will consume years of hardware evolution. I agree with you in principle but I don't think we're within a decade of that yet.

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VR/AR will continue past 8K to 16K and beyond. 240+ Hz will be desirable there too. We're going to need to keep squeezing the hardware for all it's worth for the foreseeable future. I doubt there will be "sufficiently powerful" hardware to drive that kind of workload without heroic optimization work within my lifetime.

Nah, the human eye has only ~5 MPix worth of sensors, most of them grayscale at that. We just need inexpensive eye tracking and foveated rendering.

https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/cameras-vs-human...

But our eyes can move, so while we might not need to render and update XXk@xxxHz we still need the display to have that resolution wherever we look right?

No, because you don’t need to render at full resolution where you’re not looking. That’s the appeal of foveated rendering, you just render say, a tiny 1080p region where you’re currently looking, and render the rest also at 1080p but stretched out over your entire FOV, and with fast enough frame rate and eye tracking, plus a decent blending algorithm, it will be unnoticeable.

I'm sorry if I wasn't explicit enough. What i meant is that we still need the display to have "the 16k" amount of pixels so that we can have the superhigh ppi wherever we choose to look. We indeed would only need to render high quality in a small percentage around where the eye is looking.

My bad, I see what you mean. You're quite right, although there is some research in using MEMS to move the projected foveated region physically, which would remove the need for ultra-high density displays.

Which headsets have you used? I’ve found I don’t move my eyes as much in the oculus quest but it could just be I’m conditioned at this point.

In earlier headsets it was more narrow field of view and maybe that made it feel more obvious when my eyes were moving.

I've used the Quest 2 and i did move my eyes when playing games with it. I don't know of screens with different pixel density in different areas either if we were to assume people always look straight ahead.

Our retina and occipital cortex undo a lot of rendering (e.g. line detection), therefore, a theory:

It will take such a long time to get realistic VR, that we will have direct neural interfaces that are much simpler because they can skip the encoding/decoding.

\tanget And perhaps at higher semantic neurons, so we can just invoke the concept of "cool graphics" without actually having to simulate it...

I disagee about 240Hz for VR. Who is saying that? Oculus hasn't said it and they know more about practical VR than anybody.

I think after 144Hz, you hit a point of really diminishing returns. Like is it possible in blind test to feel 240Hz vs 144Hz? It might give you in game like 1% advantage for +100% the costs.

FWIW tried testufo [0] with Samsung G7, 240Hz vs 144Hz was very noticeable on image and text scrolling tests. I guess for a person who never seen 240Hz it would be hard to identify it in a blind test, but after you've seen how the images/text looks like in scrolling, it's trivially identifiable.

- [0] testufo.com

240 is not evenly divisible by 144. Curious to know if 240 vs 120 Hz is more or less noticeable on a 240 Hz monitor than 240 vs 144 Hz on a 240 Hz monitor.

With games as long as you have good enough hardware to run the game at a steady frame rate you want it being divisible by some magic number does not matter. Also the old "standard" Hz for games is 60hz so going to 120 and then to 240 is the "natural" steps.

The old 144hz goal was/is nice if you want to display 24fps (movies) content but games don't work like that. They display correctly without any judder/pulldown at whatever frame rate you want (as long as you have the hardware to run it at that rate)

> 240 is not evenly divisible by 144.

Sounds like the beginning of a sales pitch for a 720 Hz display. :-)

But that's the point. If in a blind test you can't tell the difference, then there is very little to no perceptible difference.

If testufo was randomized with multiple repeating patterns and random offsets, it could be a much better test. Here you can accidentally bias yourself.

While they are more entertainment than science, I believe LTT performed a few tests like on this topic:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV8P6T5tTYs - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX31kZbAXsA

As someone who owns a 240hz monitor, absolutely.

And here's how I can probably immediately convince you that I can as well: drag your cursor at a rapid speed across your screen back and forth (e.g. 2-3 times across the width per second). Focusing on one spot, do you see individual cursors with gaps of background in between? (I'm assuming yes.)

Now on 120 Hz the gaps will be half as big as on 60 Hz. On 240 Hz they are half as big once again, but they are nevertheless noticeable. The size of the gaps easily allows you to distinguish between 120 and 240 Hz.

Until I can drag my cursor across the screen and see nothing but a continuous moving object, we haven't hit diminishing returns on monitor refresh rate yet.

Just because there's some measurable difference doesn't mean it has significance.

> Monitor resolution and frame rate inflation seem to have endpoints at 4K or 8K and 144Hz.

laughs in light fields

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