NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX reviewed

your eyes only distinguish detween single frames up to that frame rate. although at that rate your brain wont produce motion blur, which requires north of about 73fps. and as you way know, motion blur is how your brain generates a smooth coherent image. something that would definately help if you want to play competitively

 

As mentioned...the only problem is, the articles I illustrate don't give a north of 73fps for blur...they target much less than that. So perhaps you could point to where that 73fps comes from?

 

PAL is 25fps btw

 

Not scientific or anything, but I can certainly tell the difference between 25 and 50fps, and maybe even between 50 and ~80. I think the 24 (or 30) used in films is the _minimum_ needed for your eyes to not percieve the damn thing as a string of still images. However, when your rendering engine does not have motion blur (and film shutters _do_ have motion blur due to long exposures - take any stillframe out of an action film sequence for proof), you can see lots of undesirable effects from the finite frame rate even above that. In the most extreme case I can think of, imagine you're watching a bullet travel across in front of some bright background: the game will plot it in one position, then advance it by 1/50 of a second (at 50Hz). Now if the muzzle velocity was 1000 ft/sec, it would have travelled 20 feet just in that frame! You'd probably just see it once at the left-hand side of the screen and once at the right hand side, it would look like two bullets had momentarily appeared and then vanished! Even if you increased the frame rate to 1000Hz you'd still see a string of bullets separated by a foot each. You'd need 20`000Hz refresh rate to get the thing without those artifacts, so it just looks like a streak, believe it or not. This is really the fault of the graphics engine rendering moving objects at one _instant_ in time and not having a "shutter exposure" properly. Of course at lower frame rates it manifests itself with larger and less-rapidly-moving objects.

Even discounting that effect, I still reckon I could tell the difference between 25 and 50fps with shutter exposure included, but possibly not between 50 and ~80 any more.