I like games, especially from an artistic standpoint, but am in no way clued into the culture associated with them and nuances therein. Reviews of games will laud the inclusion of a 60fps graphical option or higher, with higher frame rate seemingly proportional to how frothy people get at the mouth to play at those rates. Adversely, a game will lose points for only having 30fps, with the reviewer only stating that they wished there were higher-rate options.
Ive only ever played on consoles at whatever default fps are baked in. I know, by standard, movies play at 24 fps, and i know that autocorrective TVs that “fill in” extra frames make that same movie look weird and feel sitcom-ish, and so fully acknowledge that frame rate has at least some importance in the *feel* of something.
I understand fully that to properly see action on a screen, a certain fps quota must be met, and i know that a stable frame rate is just as, if not, more important. But once you get above 30, why does it matter?
In: Technology
Some players report motion sickness at frames as low as 30 fps in some games. Another reason is that fps and frame pacing has a direct impact on input lag which can be really important for certain types of games like fighting games. But even in an example like that, fighting games are usually purposely capped at 60fps because of the way the timing of attacks work.
In EILF terms: basically you want a higher frame rate for a smoother experience
Movies are recorded at 24 FPS and played back at 24 FPS. This means that the frame that you’re seeing has 1/24th of a second of capture, which means there’s a lot of motion blur in it. Playing it back with the motion blur is enough to trick our eyes.
Computer games, on the other hand, deliver crisp pixel perfect frames. They don’t have any motion blur baked in, and adding it in would actually cost more resources, lowering their frame rate. Without motion blur in the frames, we need the FPS as high as possible so that we see continuous movement instead of being able to see choppy movement.
It doesn’t really /matter/ but people do like it. PC gamers are a very zealous sort and complain about being sick or being unable to play games below 30 fps, but realistically, it doesn’t really do anything but make it look smoother.
Someone competitively playing something like Rainbow 6: Siege or CounterStrike could argue that a higher frame rate means a better performance due to “input lag” (think milliseconds) and there is a case for advantage due to asynchronous fps rates, however, this is mostly due to a failure of the developer to cap it at say, 60 and arguably players with better reaction speeds may feel the difference less.
The higher the FPS the smoother the movement, but like a lot of things you just don’t know what you’re missing until you experience it firsthand. Motion blur masks the crappiness but for shooters and other fast paced games you 100% want it off because it is detrimental to actually seeing stuff. You think 30FPS is smooth movement. I got used to playing at 100FPS+ and I can literally see when the frames change when I’m playing a 60FPS game. 30FPS is like a powerpoint slideshow now and I get physically disoriented when playing at that FPS.
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