At what point does the human eye not see the difference between framerates on monitors? Is it different for each person?

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At what point does the human eye not see the difference between framerates on monitors? Is it different for each person?

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2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

There is no clear line and it varies from person to person – it even varies in the field of vision of one person.

Our vision is continuous, like an analog signal rather than digital, interpreted by our fancy brains. At some point the single images “overlap” into one another enough to look like continuous motion, that’s roughly where cinema likes to sit (30ish fps), and we got so used to it that a movie in 60fps looks weird.

Going higher and higher, you get less and less of a difference. Ultimately, as a viewer, the higher you go, the more clearly you can see faster and bigger motion. As an extreme case: a bird that may be just partially on screen for one frame in 30fps could be going across the screen smoothly at a much higher frame rate.

Since you mentioned monitors, system latency and consistency of that plays a role too. While the reaction time of a regular person sits somewhere around 150-250ms, that has little bearing on the differences we can tell on continuously changing things. Even down to a single millisecond can be intuitively clear to us – that’s (partially) how we locate where a sound comes from with our ears.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Boom my literal specialty subject. I did my College Thesis (well the UK equivalent) on this exact subject. I’ve talked about this on here before.

So in terms of FPS the average Human Eye can’t see much beyond 144. Now some will kick and scream about this so let me clarify, your eye doesn’t work in FPS and the reason why you can “feel” more FPS, and you can upto around 240 (my studies had it cap out at around 200 but I’m not going to fight over a few dozen extra), is that the brain is still detecting subtle changes even if your eye isn’t actively “seeing them”. Think like the pencil trick in your peripheral vision (not quite but eli5)

To add, 8k is also around the point where the quality caps out at any “reasonable” distance.