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Comment by hnuser123456 | Hacker News Reader

Gamers have an intuitive sense of this. Your average framerate can be arbitrarily high, but if you have a big stutter every second between the smooth moments, then a lower but more consistent framerate may be preferable, typically expressed as the 1% and 0.1% slowest frames, which at a relatively typical 100fps, represents the slowest frame every second and every 10 seconds.

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I have no hope of finding a cite for this, but a long time ago I read some command line UI research that found if you had a system where commands ranged from instant to taking a small but noticeable time and you introduced delays in the faster commands to make it so all commands took the same small but noticeable time people would think that the system was now faster overall.

I guess that’s because our minds (and animal minds as well) are always aware of the pace of repetitive events. If something is off, the anxiety alarm rings. One old book on the brain machinery described an example of a cat that was relaxing near the metronome and became alert when it was suddenly stopped. Unpredictable delays are disturbing, because a mispredicted event means you may be in a dangerous situation and have to recalibrate now.

I think the explanation may be even more low level than that. Iirc, even with a single neuron (or maybe if it was very small clusters, sorry recollection is a bit hazy) you can see that it learns to tune out a repetitive signal.

Presumably, also the reason we have those fake queue lines at airports (not sure the correct word is for it).

My understanding is that "fake queues" at airports are for security. To spread people out so that they are not all waiting in the same place.

Long queues are a prime target for terrorists, and if something bad happens, small groups of people are more manageable than large groups.

NB: Post author here.

Love this example. Might have to use that in a future post. Feel like a lot of us are running into a similar thing with remote work and video calls these days...

Similarly, I would rather have no wifi than bad/spotty wifi for this reason

For games, one compounding factor is that you need to estimate how long the next frame will take in order to know how much time to simulate. If the variance is greater, the prediction will be worse leading the perceived game "speed" to vary from frame to frame.

There was a “Latency” multiplayer setting in Starcraft 1. I think it was there precisely to give players control over smoothness of network latency instead of graphics and processing latency. I think this just adds yet another example of your observation.

Yep, I often find it useful to limit framerate to a number I know my GPU can handle so that I don't get as much stuttering. It's better to run at 60 FPS all the time than 80 FPS most of the time but with stuttering.

"Slow is smooth and smooth is fast"

Gamers do not have a more intuitive sense for this than movie watchers, video/voice talkers, not to mention users who type text into bloated web browsers or lagged remote login sessions.

I would rather have a rock-steady consistent 500 ms reponse time when typing text, than to have a 100 ms average response time which randomly spikes to outliers that go past one second.

A rock-steady, though poor, event rate in a paint application is better for drawing a freehand curve (especially if the program interpolates well) than a really fast rate that suddenly has a glitch in it, spoiling your work.

Maybe not all, but ones who create and consume analysis like this

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/msi-geforce-rtx-3090-gami...

> Gamers do not have a more intuitive sense for this than movie watchers, video/voice talkers, not to mention users who type text into bloated web browsers or lagged remote login sessions

I would be shocked if gamers didn't on average have a more intuitive sense of this than any of the groups you mentioned.

Yah, I don't think anyone's arguing that ONLY gamers will observe the phenomena, but I would be shocked if they weren't more sensitive to it than most groups.

"more sensitive" != "more intuitive"

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