frame rate conditioning

[CatXice]

Hi,

 

So I wanted to make a thread around this and I dont really know how to explain this but am sure someone with a lot more brain cells then me can explain this and do the science behind it below I will give the context.

For me anything under 100fps is unplayable, I believe the reason for this is I have had silly high Hz monitors for so long playing competitive games mainly rocket league at the time and a bit of CS:GO. In 2020 i had a 240hz display and then 2022 i got a 360hz, Now I ended up getting the alienware AW3423DW on release (the first QD-OLED that ploof got 3440x1440p 175hz g-sync ultimate), That took me months to get used to the lower Hz on that panel but even still anything below 100fps i find unplayable still and I dont mean averages i mean dips, If I dip below 100fps for more then 1 second it will throw me off completely and not just competitive games like rocket league even EA sports WRC dipped to 87fps from 130 average in the middle of a breaking zone and I missed my turn in point and went flying off the road and thats more of a fluid game in terms of my inputs if you get what I mean then reactive inputs like rocket league or CS:GO would be.

I hope this makes sense and some people with some background on these sort of matters can provide an explanation for this sort of conditioning. As i have friends who will happily play the same games at 60fps averages with 1% lows of 40fps and not even blink or notice the difference and can play just as well if not better then me (personal skill aside).

 

[Ominous]

This isn’t uncommon, almost all professional players will absolutely sacrifice visual quality for clarity. Stuttering or low frame rates absolutely has an impact on your ability. 
 

I can play singleplayer story games at 60 FPS, but I’d prefer not to. If a game has a cap like this, I will make an effort to try and raise or remove it. For anything competitive, like racing sims or multiplayer titles, then yeah, I need a consistent high frame rate.

 

Most people would also agree that it’s much harder to return to a slower refresh rate after experiencing a faster monitor for an extended period of time. Even for general desktop use, I hate using a 60hz display.

[xAcid9]

So your problem is with the frame dip/frame pacing and not framerate?

[Ominous]

21 minutes ago, xAcid9 said:

So your problem is with the frame dip/frame pacing and not framerate?

Obvs I’m not OP, but it’s both for me.

 

Sluggish framerate can make me feel physically sick at times, but I can live with it more often than not. If I’m playing competitively and need to focus, I’ll struggle with a low frame rate. It makes it harder to feel in control of what I’m doing.

 

Stuttering/dips depends on how much they dip and their frequency, too much of either makes it difficult to stay focused. I generally won’t notice it on single player games unless it’s blatantly obvious. It can completely ruin immersion

[Ha-Satan]

In my experience, inconsistency is a big contributor. Like, in the scenario where you're dropping from 130 to 87 fps, you could try capping at 90 fps so that the spike in frame time when the frame rate drops is much less pronounced.

 

Yeah, 90 fps would initially feel less smooth than 130, but your brain would adapt after a bit.

 

Competitive games are oftentimes more CPU-limited than GPU-limited on many setups, and this means that if you are playing with an uncapped frame rate, you may be bouncing off the CPU's limit quite a bit of the time. This will lead to inconsistent frame times and make the game feel less smooth.

[CatXice]

3 hours ago, xAcid9 said:

So your problem is with the frame dip/frame pacing and not framerate?

well both as you always will get 1% lows but for me if the 1% lows are under 100fps i cant live with it

[CatXice]

1 hour ago, Ha-Satan said:

In my experience, inconsistency is a big contributor. Like, in the scenario where you're dropping from 130 to 87 fps, you could try capping at 90 fps so that the spike in frame time when the frame rate drops is much less pronounced.

 

Yeah, 90 fps would initially feel less smooth than 130, but your brain would adapt after a bit.

 

Competitive games are oftentimes more CPU-limited than GPU-limited on many setups, and this means that if you are playing with an uncapped frame rate, you may be bouncing off the CPU's limit quite a bit of the time. This will lead to inconsistent frame times and make the game feel less smooth.

i see what your saying but for me if my 1% lows are under 100fps i just cant live with it

[tkitch]

I remember hoping to get 30+ fps sustained with a fancy new gpu.... 

 

And getting headshots at 20fps

[Avocado Diaboli]

3 hours ago, CatXice said:

i see what your saying but for me if my 1% lows are under 100fps i just cant live with it

Have you tried turning off the frame counter overlay and just not worrying about it? You'll probably stop noticing it once you stop actively looking for it. 

[CatXice]

7 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Have you tried turning off the frame counter overlay and just not worrying about it? You'll probably stop noticing it once you stop actively looking for it. 

ye i dont run it generally but i feel the dip i then turn it on to see if am just seeing things and sure as shit i see it drop under 100

 

[Ha-Satan]

39 minutes ago, CatXice said:

ye i dont run it generally but i feel the dip i then turn it on to see if am just seeing things and sure as shit i see it drop under 100

 

Like I said, try capping to 90 with the frame rate counter off. Then just play the game for a while. Like I said, it'll feel a little jarring at first, but after a while your brain will adjust and you will stop thinking about the frame rate and just be thinking about the game.

 

The point is, your brain will be less bothered by a lower, consistent frame rate than it will be by rapid changes in frame rate. If I'm playing a game at 130 fps and it periodically drops to 85, I notice it and it bothers me. But if I'm playing a game at a locked 85 fps, my brain becomes used to the consistent update rate and it doesn't bother me, so I can just think about the game instead of the frame rate.

[T487]

What you are noticing is the variation in frame-times. As the human brain is quite adept at noticing changes in frequency, & changes in general. 100fps has a frame-time of 10ms, which is quite low (latency). Compared to (online gaming) average/decent ping of ~50ms. In addition to a game at best taking about three frames to process the input (add another 50ms). (& many games have much more than that). In the grand scheme of things, 10ms (frame-time) latency is negligible. It is more the sudden variation of the frame-times, that can be quite jarring. This is why I always cap my frame-rate with RTSS to get rock-solid frame-times & frame-rates.

 

Below is a graph charting frame-times. As you can see, once you get past ~75fps you start to see diminishing returns. The difference between 30fps to 60fps is quite sizable (16.6ms). However, the difference between 60fps & 120fps is only 8.3ms. & the difference between 120fps & 240fps is miniscule (4.15ms). For an extra 120 frames & twice the performance cost, it only saves you around 4ms. & it just gets worse as you scale up. The main benefits you are actually getting from such a high frame-rate is better motion clarity.

 

Which leads me onto the second issue at play; image persistence. Particularly with sample & hold modern display types. These displays draw the image, hold that image in place, then paint over it with the next frame. This results in poor motion clarity, causing blurring. Slow pixel response times can also make this worse. Old CRT displays never had this issue, as they would not hold the image. & at 60Hz feel great, believe it or not. It could even be argued that much over 100Hz on a CRT would not see much improvement. (It is estimated that to get similar motion clarity to a CRT display, you would need to reach 1000Hz). If you want to learn more about this, here is a link: https://blurbusters.com/faq/oled-motion-blur/

 

[RamuBottleGrape]

15 hours ago, Ominous said:

Most people would also agree that it’s much harder to return to a slower refresh rate after experiencing a faster monitor for an extended period of time. Even for general desktop use, I hate using a 60hz display.

I daily run a dual monitor setup, 60 and 120hz, main 120hz for games and second 60hz for the rest of it,general browsing,youtube,discord ecc.
I honestly never notice the difference, maybe because on used to it daily

[saintlouisbagels]

Sounds like you need to play some retro games (Ocarina of Time is 20fps) and watch more movies (24 fps) and television (30fps).

I have the opposite "problem" - I am incapable of noticing that my iPhone and my iPad are 120Hz, and I can kind of notice it on my 16" MBP.

 

I do notice it on my 32-inch monitor (Samsung 240Hz), but it doesn't bother me when things dip down to 60fps or even 30fps.

[KidKid]

19 hours ago, CatXice said:

Hi,

 

So I wanted to make a thread around this and I dont really know how to explain this but am sure someone with a lot more brain cells then me can explain this and do the science behind it below I will give the context.

For me anything under 100fps is unplayable, I believe the reason for this is I have had silly high Hz monitors for so long playing competitive games mainly rocket league at the time and a bit of CS:GO. In 2020 i had a 240hz display and then 2022 i got a 360hz, Now I ended up getting the alienware AW3423DW on release (the first QD-OLED that ploof got 3440x1440p 175hz g-sync ultimate), That took me months to get used to the lower Hz on that panel but even still anything below 100fps i find unplayable still and I dont mean averages i mean dips, If I dip below 100fps for more then 1 second it will throw me off completely and not just competitive games like rocket league even EA sports WRC dipped to 87fps from 130 average in the middle of a breaking zone and I missed my turn in point and went flying off the road and thats more of a fluid game in terms of my inputs if you get what I mean then reactive inputs like rocket league or CS:GO would be.

I hope this makes sense and some people with some background on these sort of matters can provide an explanation for this sort of conditioning. As i have friends who will happily play the same games at 60fps averages with 1% lows of 40fps and not even blink or notice the difference and can play just as well if not better then me (personal skill aside).

 

In one video (of the RTX 5090 doing 8K gaming, Linus Tech Tips) in Linus Tech Tips, Linus played at 20fps (8K resolution), then when Linus went to 50fps (by changing settings), then he said that that was the smoothest 50fps he'd ever felt. That's because of the 20fps he played at. Maybe you should try!

[Doobeedoo]

Aside from games stutter at times, be it due to bad game or system, which feels horrible, yeah going from faster to lower definitely feels bad for sure. Anything with fast motion like shooters will feel much better at higher fps and Hz that's a fact. Ideally I'd want 120fps in general for even ultra single player game. For competitive games twice that at least. I have 4K 240Hz OLED and I switch it to dual-mode so 480Hz when I play online fps and it's instantly better. Yes game runs as high of course, clarity is vastly improved but also input lag and mouse feel is smoother and more responsive. It's just great.

[Ominous]

4 hours ago, RamuBottleGrape said:

I daily run a dual monitor setup, 60 and 120hz, main 120hz for games and second 60hz for the rest of it,general browsing,youtube,discord ecc.
I honestly never notice the difference, maybe because on used to it daily

My dual screens are 165 and 144. Whenever I have to use my MacBook or another display, I can really notice the difference. I haven’t seen a 240hz+ display yet, so I can’t really comment if I could see a notable difference between that and 144hz.

At one point I had a similar setup to you, I wouldn’t really notice a difference unless I tried to play a game on the 60hz screen. Now it’s glaringly obvious when a display is slower.

[Ha-Satan]

I absolutely think that you can condition yourself to care less about frame rate. I remember that I used to get a lot more bothered by drops under 60. Then, I played Assassin's Creed Odyssey on my PC and couldn't get a steady frame time above 30 fps to save my life. Even capping at 50 fps wasn't good enough to avoid constant judder or tearing (depending on my V-sync settings).

 

Eventually I gave up and capped at 30 fps. At first it was jarring but to my surprise I got used to it really quickly and found the game to be totally playable.

 

In hindsight I'm honestly really happy about it because I've stopped feeling compelled to constantly upgrade my hardware to maintain a high frame rate.

 

Sometimes when I say this I get accused of just huffing copium, and maybe that's true to an extent. But with the prices of hardware spiraling out of control and games getting increasingly more demanding despite graphical fidelity not really improving much, my hope is that more people can realize that they can actually enjoy games just fine at lower frame rates and settings, because then maybe they won't let themselves get fucked in the ass by Nvidia's pre-scalped GPU prices.

[CatXice]

1 hour ago, Ha-Satan said:

I absolutely think that you can condition yourself to care less about frame rate. I remember that I used to get a lot more bothered by drops under 60. Then, I played Assassin's Creed Odyssey on my PC and couldn't get a steady frame time above 30 fps to save my life. Even capping at 50 fps wasn't good enough to avoid constant judder or tearing (depending on my V-sync settings).

 

Eventually I gave up and capped at 30 fps. At first it was jarring but to my surprise I got used to it really quickly and found the game to be totally playable.

 

In hindsight I'm honestly really happy about it because I've stopped feeling compelled to constantly upgrade my hardware to maintain a high frame rate.

 

Sometimes when I say this I get accused of just huffing copium, and maybe that's true to an extent. But with the prices of hardware spiraling out of control and games getting increasingly more demanding despite graphical fidelity not really improving much, my hope is that more people can realize that they can actually enjoy games just fine at lower frame rates and settings, because then maybe they won't let themselves get fucked in the ass by Nvidia's pre-scalped GPU prices.

this is y i went to 4080 from 3080ti for the frame gen and i dont think i will really see a got reason to change my card out not for a long time now and it only cost me 200 quid to swap cards 

[strange13930]

I have to deal with the low fps dips on my 6500 xt, I have learned to live with it till I upgrade my gpu

[Mark Kaine]

On 2/18/2025 at 9:24 PM, strange13930 said:

I have to deal with the low fps dips on my 6500 xt, I have learned to live with it till I upgrade my gpu

The thing is, as long your system functions properly you can usually get around it... Low textures,low shadows, weak AA or no AA, etc. aka low settings, even lower res can help.

 

Basically you need to decide what's more important to you, high/stable framerate or eye candy...

 

Me I'll always go for stable or at least playable framerates, most games nowadays look still good at low/med settings anyway.

 

(not that I'm actually doing this regularly, my 3070 is more than fine for almost anything I throw at it, but been there done that, with a 1050ti, a 1060, 5500xt...)