240 fps video playback

[animefreak4242]

For work we need to see if there is a way to play a video file at a consistent 240 fps. 

We already have a monitor that can do this. The question is do we need any special graphics card?

We are going to be testing our setup first on a Lenovo thinkServer t130, unless there is a severe bottleneck in that system for this setup 

Any help with this is greatly appreciated. 

[WereCat]

You need at least Display Port 1.2 for 240Hz at 1080p.

 

[mariushm]

Few video cards will have hardware decoders capable of sustaining 240 fps if the resolutions are high.

 

For 1080p content, most hardware h264 video card decoders stop at around 140-160 fps, because they only need to handle 120fps or more (for h264 3D content)

Some expensive Intel CPUs can do up to 190-230fps depending on how the video file was encoded.

 

See https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=171219

 

My advice would be to recompress the video to a codec that's easier to decode, so that it can be played back completely using a reasonably powerful processor. For example, convert your video to MPEG-2 ... can be any bitrate, like 100-200 mbps for example, shouldn't matter.

 

You may be able to play a h264 encoded video at 240fps provided you compress it in some very easy that would make it easy to decode and use just the processor (a ryzen or some six-eight core cpu for multithreading purposes)

 

x264 has -tune fastdecode and you can also tweak some encoding settings to make decoding faster (like reduced number of reference frames, less variable bitrate etc), which should make playing smooth 240fps possible with 720p content  and possibly even 1080p.

 

 

[animefreak4242]

2 hours ago, mariushm said:

Few video cards will have hardware decoders capable of sustaining 240 fps if the resolutions are high.

 

For 1080p content, most hardware h264 video card decoders stop at around 140-160 fps, because they only need to handle 120fps or more (for h264 3D content)

Some expensive Intel CPUs can do up to 190-230fps depending on how the video file was encoded.

 

See https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=171219

 

My advice would be to recompress the video to a codec that's easier to decode, so that it can be played back completely using a reasonably powerful processor. For example, convert your video to MPEG-2 ... can be any bitrate, like 100-200 mbps for example, shouldn't matter.

 

You may be able to play a h264 encoded video at 240fps provided you compress it in some very easy that would make it easy to decode and use just the processor (a ryzen or some six-eight core cpu for multithreading purposes)

 

x264 has -tune fastdecode and you can also tweak some encoding settings to make decoding faster (like reduced number of reference frames, less variable bitrate etc), which should make playing smooth 240fps possible with 720p content  and possibly even 1080p.

 

 

WOW this was a great response. 

 

So I am using matlab to build the file, literally frame by frame, I can store it anyway that matlab supports:

 https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/videowriter.html#inputarg_filename

 

The resolution won't matter because the frames are going to be solid colors, or checkerboard patterns. But we want to change the colors faster than 60hz to see how people respond to the light changing. They won't actually look at the screen, they will look at a wall lit up by the screen (and yes we have already screened for epilepsy)