Why wrong FOV is not a small issue

[eRe4s3r]

Same problem here, 1 eye is simply like 15ms out of sync (and focus) with the other, for me 3D works great, it just causes me intense headache after a while and a feeling of dizziness .. well it was Avatar and that movie is fairly long and has great 3D... but that was the first and last one for me.

The funny thing is, the 3D technology isn't really "dead"

If someone invested proper money in a dual-display that has left/right screen and ability to measure and sync to our eyes separately it can work for a great many people. Your eye issue Volatar is even among the rarer eye issues rare.. for most people the 3D headache is a simple "timing/syncro" problem, simple as in.. its easy to find.. but its extremely difficult to properly sync a device to a single eye and another device to another eye.

By the way, the other issue with 3D is the way its layered, for this to be really fixed and watchable the movie would have to be literally rendered as shown and not post-edited so that the 3D is in layers (which currently is required because of the brain-dead technology) (Just so you understand this, this means a movie would essentially need to be rendered twice, once for each eye

I got no reply yet by way

[BobTheJanitor]

Tangentially related to this, but I thought it would be worth getting in here since it relates to the idea of developers ignoring very obvious problems and pretending that said problems don't exist: The game King Arthur II is out and apparently the developer have designed it around the idea that getting 20ish FPS in battles is just fine. No really, they did! Check out this post on their official forums, where one of the developers says this:

It is not bad performance and not too low. If it gets below 20 FPS than it is bad performance. 24 FPS is what a human eye sees as fluid and you watch the films in the cinema with 24 FPS – do you go to cinema again and again to see bad performance and horribly low FPS

Never mind the many differences between film and computer screen. There it is, words of wisdom. 24 fps is enough for anyone. It's apparently all the human eye can see. So by logical deduction, if you claim that it doesn't look good or that you prefer something higher than that, you must be lying, or an idiot, or possibly a lying idiot. Pretty amazing. Just thought I'd throw that out there. I, for one, don't seem to have too much trouble with low FOV headaches, but I've been wearing coke-bottle glasses for years so my eyes are pretty well shot, and I'm quite used to my peripheral vision containing nothing but wire frames and some vague blur. But I am quite prone to low FPS headaches. I'm a dumb obsessive gamer, so I will often bully through and keep playing anyway if the game is good enough and I can't tweak the graphics low enough to get smooth gameplay out of it, and then pay for it later. But I definitely won't be buying any game where the developer actually thinks that anything sub-60 fps on a good gaming rig is quality performance. Yuck!

[keith.lamothe]

Iirc, pre-4.0 (pre-unity) AIW was locked to 20fps (except when you used the + speed frameskip) because the sim was 20 cycles per second and the render always came after a cycle.

Now (in unity) it can render multiple times per cycle and (iirc) we've got it capped at 60fps.

Most of my games run in the 10-25fps range, because my gpu is pitiful, but I generally don't notice.  Apparently the KA2 guys were making it for people like me

[eRe4s3r]

Arthur 2 is horrible negative example for another thing -> GUI Font size. But that they designed the game around 12-24fps is .... something for the history books specially because Arthur 2 does not even run at 24 fps for many, many people.

And 24fps only works if its ABSOLUTELY constant + extreme Motion Blur in fast scenes.

[BobTheJanitor]

Yeah 24 FPS works in cinemas because movies can have motion blur for fast moving objects. Your mind fills in the details, so you don't need all those extra frames. With graphics, something is either here or there, and if it doesn't move through the intervening space, you don't see it. It looks more and more like a series of pictures of something in slightly different poses as opposed to looking like motion. Maybe games will get good with motion blur eventually, but as far as I know there isn't anyone doing it so far. Outside of using motion blur when you're moving fast, or turning quickly. And that usually looks horrible and I wish games wouldn't do it. (Dead Island, I'm looking at you)

Here's an FPS comparison I found (as the first google result, so I put a lot of effort into that) http://www.boallen.com/fps-compare.html

[keith.lamothe]

Here's an FPS comparison I found (as the first google result, so I put a lot of effort into that) http://www.boallen.com/fps-compare.html

Interesting!  So maybe that 24fps thing is just a myth.  Call the Mythbusters, something must be exploded!

[BobTheJanitor]

Found another thing: http://frames-per-second.appspot.com/

That lets you simulate the same thing at the same FPS but one with motion blur and one without. That shows better than anything how much a little motion blur helps to cover low FPS. And since games don't do that, at least not yet, 24 FPS just won't fly. But for celluloid, sure, it looks fine.

[eRe4s3r]

For me everything below 60fps looks like its skipping
@ Keith, there is no myth to bust, eyes don't "refresh" at a fixed 24fps... ever. It all depends on where you focus, the fov, the delay and how healthy and awake you are..

For movies the constant distance to the screen allows us to not even notice the 24fps (due to blur) this also has artistic reasons, 30fps require more brain processing power (shifts more brain power from listening and understanding the story to seeing the image)

For games, where we control the camera, the higher the FPS the better.... at best it is in perfect constant sync with the screen refresh

[keith.lamothe]

@ Keith, there is no myth to bust, eyes don't "refresh" at a fixed 24fps... ever. It all depends on where you focus, the fov, the delay and how healthy and awake you are..

I mean that some people have been claiming for years that you can't tell the difference between 24 and 60 or whatever.  That's when you get Adam and Jamie to find some way in which blowing up a car will demonstrate how wrong that is.

[BobTheJanitor]

Sure, record something blowing up at different speeds. They have all those high speed cameras around. They can test if there's a noticeable difference between all sorts of different FPS measurement and bust that 'top speed that the human eye can see' myth. I like it.

[keith.lamothe]

And if those other guys don't reply to eRe4s3r's fov-complaint we can pack them into the front row seats of the demonstration so they can help investigate how fast a human can shield their eyes from flying burning shrapnel.

Not that I'd do that to them, but I'm not entirely sure eRe4s3r wouldn't.

[eRe4s3r]

Nah I am a perfectly nice guy, even when I hate (very few) developers for being ignorant dimples... if they intentionally make me ill then I simply can't be quiet about it.

Its gonna be a laugh if they do reply, but I doubt it....

[Mánagarmr]

I can EASILY tell the difference between watching movies on my old "fat" TV and my parents 100 Hz modern flat screen TV. The difference is like night and day. You can actually follow the action on their TV. On mine it's just a chaotic blur.

[Shrugging Khan]

Overly narrow FOV is the reason I insta-quit playing many games.

BTW, so what IS the maximum FPS the human eye can make use of?

[BobTheJanitor]

BTW, so what IS the maximum FPS the human eye can make use of?

Good question. I don't know if there's an exact number for that. It probably varies from person to person, like range of hearing and other such things. I started trying to research it and ran across enough reading material to keep me busy for a while. It probably depends on what you're looking at too. I mean if it's a black screen that blinks white for one frame, how quick would that frame have to be before you wouldn't notice it? 1/100th of a second? 1/1000th? But if it was a black screen blinking dark brown, it would be quite different. Here's a few wikipedia articles I found from some quick searching:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_of_vision
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold