60Fps - is it really that important?

[Zappykins]

This is the thing - not everybody is going to see much of a difference! Some people will say it's a big difference - it's how they see. Other will say it hardly looks different to them - here is the thing Both are Telling the Truth!

People's eyes work differently.

Some people see 'faster' and have a different 'persistence of vision' than others. The standard flashing of a movie - at 48 images per second is because most people will see fairly fluid movement at that rate (movies are shot at 24 Images per second, but the images are flashed twice - sometime 3 times) Many people would see the flashing at 24, but 48 fools the eye into thinking there is smooth movement.

The recent High Frame Rate of The Hobbit was shot and shown at 48 images per second. Some people loved the difference, some people hated it and said it looked like a soap opera, and then a tiny few said, “That’s nice, but we really need to go faster.”

So it’s very, very personal. Just like many males, and some females have various levels of color deficiency – called colour blindness. There are 3 common forms (protanomaly deuteranomaly and tritanopia), and often varying levels of how much they effect someone’s ability to distinguish colours – sometimes varying in each eye. Eye speed changes within individuals. Some parts of some people's eyes can notice 200Hz!

Some baseball players, pilots, and our very own ZappyKins have super fast mutant vision and can see beyond 60 Hz (60 fps). It can be very helpful for some industries. But nothing is all good - this causes some of them to not be able to enjoy movies, see blinking lights where others see steady ones, get headaches from lights, and other issues. Most of the new LED car lights are super annoying!

Personally, I do not enjoy going to the cinema much anymore as many have low quality DPL projectors. I see the flashing of each colour of the colour wheel and it’s like watching a movie in a bad disco with someone trying to poke you I the eye. It’s annoying and sad.

So it really is a personal thing. I know some people hate the High Frame Rate and ‘Video Smooth’ of say some new 120Hz or 240Hz Tvs. I have no idea how they do not like it better. It looks so much better to me! (But as I said earlier, I see differently and would prefer games at 120Hz!) Let me know if you are a fellow mutant.

So to me it’s much nicer if a game has 60Hz, but it’s still kind of jumpy on much of the animation.