Mr Kissyfur wrote:
Seriously, I don't understand. If 24fps looks seamless to me in a film, why would 60fps on a PC look better? It's like the 16 million colour thing with SVGA and onwards - the human eye can't differentiate that many colours anyway.
I'm not trolling or anything, I'm genuinely interested.
I've done this before Mr K but I guess you didn't read those threads
There's a big difference between film and games when it comes to framerate, in simple terms films have motion blur built into them, whereby one frame 'blurs' into the next (just pause any DVD when there's any kind of movement on screen, wherever stuff is changing dramatically from one frame to the next, the picture is blurred).
Games don't have that, so the brain perceives the 'jump' from one frame to the next far more easily.
So whereas a film running at 24FPS can appear smooth, a game running at 24FPS will be noticeably jerky as each frame is an absolutely distinct image.
Most TFTs have a refresh rate of 60Hz, so if a console/PC can chuck out 60FPS, the game will appear as smooth as possible on that screen to the human eye. (There are now 120Hz screens of course, which is a whole different thing, although you're then getting into the realms of what the human eye can actually perceive.)
Short answer, it's down to motion blur.
(Some games do build motion blur in, which can, to an extent, achieve the same effect as motion blur in films.)
Now there have been some discussions about this here at BEEX before...... (to say the least)...... Some folks don't mind 30FPS (which is what console games are generally targeted at), some folks say they can't tell the difference between 30FPS and 60FPS or anything inbetween.
Personally speaking I hate 30FPS, it genuinely gives me a headache after an extended play session. I didn't need FRAPS to tell me that BF3 was running at 30-45FPS when I upped the resolution to 2560x1440, because I could very easily perceive it, which is why I've sacrificed resolution to get the framerate back up to 60FPS (or very close to it, above a constant 50FPS and certainly 55FPS, you then hit a 'perceptual 60FPS').
There's no 'definitive answer' I suppose, the Eurogamer face-offs always place a large emphasis on framerate, in particular how the CoD series always aims for the 'holy grail' of 60FPS at the expense of graphical fidelity. (30FPS basically doubles the input lag from 60FPS, for example.)
EDIT - Some reading here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate