Why is is so important games run at 60fps?

[Sqrl]

Wow there is a lot of misinformation in this thread =P

Ok the first thing you need to understand is that your eye isn't the only thing involved in this process. Your brain plays an extremely vital role as well. In the real world things that move to quickly appear to blur. In most games up till now motion blur has not been around and the result is that you have crisp frames of animation that show up without motion blurring which makes the game appear jumpy and rigid. With this setup 60 FPS is required for most people to not see tons of jumping and sharp transitions etc..

Now when you add good motion blurring (I say "good" because bad motion blurring will hurt the matter) suddenly 30 FPS looks fluid and if you have excellent motion blurring like in a movie you can bring the FPS down to as low as 24 and practically nobody can tell the difference. This is part of the reason why 24 is standard (because its out of the range of perception for the vast majority of people due to the motion blurring captured on film).

Now where your brain comes in is in translating that blurring into fluidity of motion. Because it sees the information that the object(s) moved through space to get where they are it interprets that as a fluid movement, where as without the blurring it sees the object at one location and then suddenly another and it appears to have jumped.. So really the FPS situation boils down to a function not only have how rapidly your eye percieves changes but how those changes happen or specifically what it looks like while their changing.

Now supposedly, (I haven't seen this data/research personally but the story was one I heard from a professor) air force pilots have been able to identify an airplane that was flashed on a projector for only 1/200th of a second. But supposedly thats because of the way bright light will continue to effect your vision for a few seconds after exposure.

There is a lot on this subject that I don't feel comfortable speaking too, but I am reasonably certain that the data I have just typed is accurate as all of it was stuff I learned in a classroom setting.