How necessary is 60fps?

[Koko Ricky]

If you're like me—early 30s, grew up playing frequently sluggish video games with no complaints—then you probably have a lot of fond memories of gaming at 30fps or lower. I even accepted the atrocious slideshow of early N64 games and the stamp-sized view window for Doom back in my 386 days. Admittedly, I would not want to play anything below 30 or 24fps, but I can still go back and play some of those sluggish games and enjoy them. Nowadays, modern games aim for 60fps, especially first person shooters. But how much benefit is there, really, for the gamer? I don't feel significant improvement in my aiming at 60fps, and at 30fps I don't feel as though I'm not receiving enough visual information. What am I gaining from doubling the framerate?

[Voros]

15-20 is bearable.
30 is enough.
60 is also enough.

My sweet spot lies somewhere between 40-50 fps.

[snapshot]

144 FPS ftw.

[Job]

60 FPS is a benchmark.

What's necessary? Potable water. And, arguably, indoor plumbing.

[Vorpal]

Depends on the game, snes titles look horrible to me at 30 fps and I really need that 60, and doom mouse control feels horrible at 60 fps and I need to play it at 30 (or 35? whatever)

[Dragonfly]

I feel the required FPS is one where you no longer feel any input lag. Be that 30, 60, 120, 144, whatever your mind feels is better, is better for you. I play PC games at 144 because I can and am one of the immensely lucky few of us who at one point in their life had enough disposable income to build a good PC and buy a snazzy monitor. (those days have since passed, sadly.)

 

However, when playing on older consoles such as N64 or PS1 I can deal with the choppier frame rates, so long as my game play is not hindered by it. If I feel the game is noticeably eating / ignoring my inputs and puts me in a disadvantaged position, then that is the point I call lag 'unacceptable'. This is forgivable in lesser active gaming such as puzzles, but in timing specific games such as Doom, or hell, even Tetris, having your inputs delayed or ignored is unacceptable.

[MrGlide]

like stated above, it's mostly a delay time thing. I will say playing shooters that allow 120-144hz is really nice, but makes fps games stuck at 60 a pain when directly switched over. 144hz, feels so much better, and is far less choppy than 60hz. I'v been replaying the crap out of The new wolfinsteins, rage and re4, and after coming back to these I found it frusterating because how choppy everything was. 60fps is fine though really.

[Koko Ricky]

I agree that not noticing lag should be the benchmark, regardless of framerate. Strangely, I find it difficult to tell the difference between 30 and 60. I have been working with video for 13 years, have been a gamer for 26 years and have been a visual artist for at least that long. And yet, I find the difference between these two framerates nearly impossible to tell apart. So for me lag stops at 24fps (being that that is the standard for most cinema and TV, which is designed to not have lag), and thus 30 is merely icing on the cake. And 60? I don't even notice. It just looks like 30 to me.

[KVELLER]

Personally, I usually don't care as long as I have a stable framerate. I used to play Wild Metal Country, which had a 20 fps lock and I never had any problem with it, but when I'm getting 60+ fps and then 30 when looking somewhere else, I start going insane.

 

47 minutes ago, MrGlide said:

144hz, feels so much better, and is far less choppy than 60hz.

I don't know how you can call 60hz choppy, but then again, I haven't ever used a display with a higher frecuency.

 

I'm afraid that the day I can finally get one of those I won't be able to look back anymore.

[Urthar]

30 is as low as I can tolerate, though I prefer to play at 60 vsync'ed since screen tearing bothers me.

 

If I had a powerful enough system, I'd play at 120.

[UglyStru]

If you've never played with 60fps, you won't miss it. But once you do, you'll never want to go back to anything less. 

[ShoDemo]

Since I haven't had an ultra strong PC yet, 30 fps is in my opinion tolerable for any game that is not a first person shooter.

 

 

For an FPS however, I want at least 50-60 fps, or else I may find it hard to aim and it feels kinda frustrating.

Example: In the case that I can have high graphics and 30 fps, I will change it to low graphics and 60 fps.

 

Now for console games, I have played Doom on the GBA, Spyro Enter the Dragonfly and GTA Vice City Stories on the PS2. And these games didn't seem to have 30 fps (many drops), but I played them either way. So, I guess I don't care that much about framerate on older consoles.

[Red]

Really depends on the game

 

On a lot of games I don't mind 30 if the game is turn based or generally slow and don't require more precise input, but fighting games and most action games do require 60 and up to properly function.

[silentzorah]

60 FPS or higher is critical in multiplayer situations.  Nothing is worse than playing at 20 FPS, being unable to acquire a target due to gaps in the information stream, let alone aiming at said target.

 

Single player is another story, since AI rarely moves like human opponents.

[Koko Ricky]

1 hour ago, KVELLER said:

...but when I'm getting 60+ fps and then 30 when looking somewhere else, I start going insane.

 

I don't know how you can call 60hz choppy, but then again, I haven't ever used a display with a higher frecuency.

Framerate shifts are definitely jarring as fuck. I definitely do not like that. I notice in those moments for sure. Like, I may not see a huge difference in a side-by-side comparison, but if refresh rate keeps changing depending on how much is being rendered at any given time, it is for sure a dealbreaker. Also, the people who think 60hz is choppy...I think are possibly delusional. The human eye is not very good at registering fast motion. Like if you literally wave your hand in front of your face you will notice characteristic motion blur that would not occur if say, you were recording a hand wave on a camera with say, a 1/100th shutter speed (the equivalent of 100FPS, downgraded to 24, 30 or whatever the video is shooting at). With that in mind humans are not going to see much difference between 60hz and 144hz.

[everennui]

For me it really just depends on the game. If I'm play Skyrim, then I'll play on my 60" 60hz TV with "game mode" and I'll be happy that I did because the screen is massive and I feel literally immersed in the game. If I'm playing a competitive FPS game then the more the better. More frames = a smoother experience. A few years ago, I was at a friends house and he had two PCs and they were both capable of playing whatever CoD was out at the time. On his enthusiast build he had a top of the line 1080p 144hz monitor it was like $800 brand new and the other computer he had some stock monitor that came with the computer from Dell. 60hz. He was kind/gracious enough to switch with me between rounds and while I couldn't really tell the difference, visually, playing the game was a whole different story. I consistently did better on the monitor with 144hz. 60hz (60FPS) 1-2 kills per round better. 

It seems like with a lower FPS, even if you have the crosshair on the target and fire, you still miss sometimes. I don't find that to be true at 120hz and there are loads of blind tests on youtube showing that people can tell the difference between 120 and 144. 

So it doesn't really matter for an RPG game, but for an FPS it makes all the difference in the world. 

For the most part I can't really tell the difference between 60 and 120, but for 30 and 60, it's night and day.

Addendum: Just to clarify, I'm saying that I can't percieve a difference, but I think there is one.

Edited August 28, 2017 by everennui

[Erick]

30FPS is playable enough for me if a game includes a single-player mode and isn't all that fast-paced. For older console games I have a bit of higher tolerance for 30FPS and somehow lower, albeit not like below 20FPS since that would be unplayable for me. Other than that, I can't say I really want to play below 60FPS on PC since then I would be gimping my own experience, multiplayer games comes to mind.

[129thVisplane]

I'm quite content playing games at around 20fps. Anything higher is just a bit of extra smoothness that I find nice and pleasing but it's not necessary. Multiplayer would be an obvious exception but I literally don't play any multiplayer game except ZDaemon and I get a solid 35fps there.

 

My gamemachine isn't the best thing in the world so with the more modern and more graphics-heavy games (see also: doom 2016) I'm often stuck at low framerates, but I don't really give a fuck, as long as the game runs at all. I do have my limits though. Trying to play a map that makes the framerate drop to 5fps (im looking at you, doom maps with shitloads of linedefs in view) is pretty much impossible.

[Koko Ricky]

SnapMap has had an interesting problem with framerates. I was watching a video where several pinkies were onscreen simultaneously and for about half a minute, the framerate would suddenly dip to about 2-6FPS, and for a few moments, less than one. Then it picked back up and ran normally. Insanely unacceptable gameplay, but then again id had no idea what people would do with SnapMap and thus couldn't take into account every possible way to optimize it.

[Death Destroyer - 4.7m4d]

I have a crappy laptop , but I can play games like doom at a steady 35fps. I have played in another computer ; a much better one , were doom can be played at an amazing 75fps .Honestly I cant tell much difference between them aside from the smoother movement . 

 

So from my doom experience , there is not much difference in doubling frame rate specifically in doom, however if you are talking about other games especially hardware intensive games like counter-strike , then high fps is definitely necessary.    

[wheresthebeef]

If a game is made where the controls feel just fine at low framerates, it is all playable to me.

 

The Order 1886, for all it's faults, still felt perfectly fine even locked at 30fps. Prey on PS4, at least the demo, felt like absolute dogshit because there was a delay. The same goes for Dishonored 2, felt bad to look and move around, while on PC with a stable 60+ framerate, it felt perfectly fine.

 

I used to play a lot of N64 games back in the 90s, but I can't go back to many of them now because of how badly they handle. Doom 64 is fine, Duke 64 a little less so because of the springy joystick.

 

I've been playing Serious Sam Revolution (which basically combines FE and SE and a few engine updates) with my brother with 10x enemy spawns with 10x fire rate on your weapons, and there's sections where the framerate is between 1-5 even on my 1070 because of how many monsters spawn in. It still feels fine and I'm able to play, and when half the horde gets slaughtered and it crawls back to a real smooth framerate, the game almost looks like it's animating super fast or something. Looks great though.

 

The thing I notice next to framerate is aliasing and hate when games don't properly support that. I don't care for VSync on or off, so I'm willing to sacrifice that for more frames.

[Nevander]

I'm the kind of guy who can notice the difference between 59 and 60, so you know what I'm going to say. 60 FPS or bust.

[Battle_Korbi]

I basically don't care if its 10 FPS, as long as it is consistent. What fucks me up the most is playing 30-40 FPS then having 1 frame per 4-5 seconds drops every now and then (like 10 times in a minute) and when that starts happening I immediately regret getting the game at all.

 

I guess 60 FPS feels nice to look at but I am fine with framerates which are even below 30 FPS as long as the FPS doesn't trip and fall over every several seconds. I guess 20 FPS is acceptable, 10 is self-harm and below 0 is heresy.

[geo]

Famous Youtubers tell us its necessary so it must be.

[CARRiON]

I can tolerate no lower than 30 but prefer 60.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

Below 15 is annoying as hell and makes games feel like shit, Even turn-based ones like Darkest Dungeon feel horrible with that low of an fps. Y'all equating 10 with 60 fps need a freaking better machine to see the difference lol. (I have both, fuck playing with horrid fps)

[Lila Feuer]

Depends on the game, I can tolerate classic Doom at the original 35 fps but seeing motion in 60 fps made a big difference and made it almost feel like a BUILD engine game. But Wolfenstein 3D at its whoppin' 70 fps is going to be really uncomfortable for me if it's running around 30 or lower even though some grew up with it like that.

Worse yet, if it's a game that is suppose to be 60 but is running at half that or slightly lower, like Unreal Engine 1 games and Carmageddon TDR 2000 were behaving on Windows 8.1 it will drive me mad because I know it is blatantly wrong. Curiously and thankfully enough these games' frame rates got corrected again when moving over to Windows 10.

F.E.A.R. 1 was also doing something similar when it detected my Logitech G710 keyboard which somehow caused an effect similar to a memory leak where after exactly 9 minutes of playing the frame rate tanked from 60 to 40 and below, which required a fix. You have no idea how terrible a game like F.E.A.R. looks when everything looks so 'cinematic'.

I can live with frame limiters like Grand Theft Auto III, since I've always been used to it looking like this to begin with. Even though it is a lazy and terrible practice to tie game logic to the CPU.

But the biggest offender of them all is micro stutter and highly temperamental and constantly inconsistent frame rates as a result of poor optimization usually or just bad code. This ruins otherwise good games like Wolfenstein: The New Order.

[NinjaLiquidator]

After you will see 60fps once, 30fps looks choppy for you forever. Theoretical limit of smooth video is 25fps, but in fact you subliminaly percept way more than 800fps, cause eye pixels refresh asyncronously (like red pixels in Wolf3D when you die)

[MrGlide]

9 hours ago, GoatLord said:

the people who think 60hz is choppy...I think are possibly delusional.

Most definitely not, but hey, you asked, I answered, then you called me crazy. Whatever.

[scifista42]

As long as the delay between frames is relatively consistent over time and never higher than 1/25 of a second, I'm fully happy.