
30 fps vs. 60fps: Am I crazy for not seeing a difference? - ldd
The only time someone has ever insulted me for my beliefs was when I claimed that I could honestly not see the difference between 30fps and 60fps.
Now, either I am lying, you are lying, or neither of us is lying.
Could it be possible that, just like colour blindness, some people are just incapable of seeing a difference?
I am asking now in the hopes that the discussion remains civil
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Perdition
I would think you have something significantly wrong with your visual system
if you can't see the difference. People have gone "blind" while having no
physical defects to their visual system, so it is possible you really can't
see the difference.

I don't think you should be insulted for making this claim, but there are a
lot of trolls out there that make it. So it is a bit like getting annoyed by a
bunch of trolls running around claiming the sky is green and then running into
someone who really sees the sky as green.

I've included a link to a demo that to me shows clearly the difference in
frame rate.

[http://www.30vs60fps.com/](http://www.30vs60fps.com/)

~~~
ldd
Thanks for your comment. I'll simply say that I am glad that you can see the
difference, I acknowledge that there is a difference for you and for the
majority of people out there, and it just so happens that for me, even after
carefully watching the examples, I cannot see a difference.

~~~
Perdition
I'm not sure of any names but I know there are neuroscience people that study
vision and might be interested in studying you.

The human visual system is fascinatingly complex so something like this isn't
too surprising.

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dottrap
Situation matters sometimes, but you can perceive the difference between 30
fps and 60 fps. Military and commercial aerospace flight simulators learned
this early on and they MUST hold 60 fps or pilots get sick.

High end digital televisions and cinema are having a hard time jumping to 60
fps which for many reasons would simplify things since the rest of the
consumer electronics works at that, but traditional cinema is locked at 24
fps. There are various stories around you should be able to find that when
cinema experiments with 60 fps (or even 48 fps), or compare televisions that
can automatically upscale the framerate, consumers complain that it looks
"cheap" because the quality matches what they see on YouTube or their home
video camera or the evening news. People have been conditioned to accept 24
fps as high quality cinematic so they think it looks "cheap" when in reality
they are getting more fidelity. (You should be able to find old reviews of The
Hobbit and people comparing it to the evening news.)

To your original point though, in this case, people were able to distinguish
the different frame rates. The difference necessarily register as frame rate
to people, or paradoxically, necessarily even better.

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nostrademons
Nope, not crazy. 24fps has long been the standard for "as smooth as real life"
motion in the movie & TV industries. The human eye needs a minimum of about 12
fps to perceive images as smooth motion. I used to do 2D Javascript games at
15 fps and while it clearly wasn't cinema-quality motion, it was perfectly
playable.

The reason 60fps has become such a buzzword lately is because most laptop &
phone screens refresh at 60Hz, and so you physically can't do better than
that. At that frame rate, the electronics of the display become the bottleneck
rather than your CPU/GPU power, and most engineers would rather say some
engineer is the bottleneck rather than deal with the fuzziness of human
perception.

~~~
Perdition
>24fps has long been the standard for "as smooth as real life" motion in the
movie & TV industries.

Which is fine only for non-action scenes, and film also has motion blur to
make movement look smoother.

Action scenes in games (especially without pseudo motion blur) look
significantly better at higher than 30 fps.

24 fps was also chosen as "the minimum we can get away with", so I see no
reason not to increase it when you don't have to pay for film stock.

------
Someone
Not really an answer, but the flicker fusion frequency varies between subjects
and depends hugely on both the subject's physiological state and the kind of
flicker.
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold)
lists seven factors (size, color, where it occurs on the retina, contrast,
etc)

[http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/User:Eugene_M._Izhikevic...](http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/User:Eugene_M._Izhikevich/Proposed/Flicker_fusion)
shows some curves that show the effect of several of these factors.

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chrisBob
I am sure that people have different refresh times in their eyes. I don't
consume a lot of video, so the only time I remember noticing a poor video
frame rate was when watching Up! in 3-D. I think the theatre just divided the
30fps between the two eyes, and panning shots bothered me so much I had to
close my eyes a few times.

In every day life I am constantly bothered by LED tail lights, and cheap video
projectors. In both cases I clearly see the individual blinks in the case of
the LEDs and the color cycle in the case of the projectors. I find in quite
distracting.

Most people can't even see what I am talking about when I describe it and they
go seeking it out.

------
darkxanthos
Being someone who can see the difference like night and day, I imagine there
must be something that varies per individual... which also makes me feel like
you are lying. So I totally understand where you're coming from.

~~~
ldd
As I told another user, I am very aware that my position is a minority
position, and I must deduce that most people can in fact see a difference
(there is no reason for everyone is this thread to lie to a complete stranger
for no apparent reason.) And yeah, I can see why you'd think that I am lying,
but all I can say is that my experience is what it is, that's all.

~~~
MichaelStubbs
Do you consume much media? I ask because I used to be similar to you; I never
used to be able to distinguish between 30fps vs 60fps but I find that the more
media I consume, the more the difference becomes apparent to me.

Aside from that, one of the clearest videos I've seen the difference in is:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-dOuBcxMlk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-dOuBcxMlk)
\- the commentary isn't very constructive in that video but I see a rather
large difference between gameplay clips.

~~~
Jeremy1026
Honestly, I didn't see a difference in the two. I'm sure that 60FPS is better,
but I also just don't "see" it.

~~~
mod
I couldn't see it during the hearthstone example, but it was abundantly clear
during counter-strike.

