Well, to start off, don’t put words on my mouth, I never said that informing consumer that the game has a lock is bad.

Higher FPS definitely allow for better “interaction” for the player, as far as perception of movement and reaction times are concerned, but here is the thing that is hard for most PC Elitist to understand: Art is not about performance or fidelity.

Just because oil painting has a higher color fidelity than Watercolor doesn’t mean watercolor is inferior to oil painting. A painting can be blurry, sketchy, strokeful and what not. You don’t make a music “better” just by amplifying instrument fidelity, it’s not about “how easy” is to interact or perceive the opus, or how clean or sharp it is. It’s about the kind of vibe it gives to appreciators, and I’m not talking about concious judgement but truly, vibe, a subconcious stimuli that alters your perception of that universe. You don’t need to go far in Arts to see this fact, in any art fields. Old, noisey and rash music still sound better than many clear, precise and clean versions of the same music. Paintings strokeful and blurry still convey messages more impressive than many clean and sharp digital paintings.

And for that matter, yes, 30 FPS is about as a good choice as 24, 48, 60, 72, 90, 120 FPS, as long as it agrees with the rest of the art piece. As long as it is concise and truthful.

As for you request, it’s not about the plataform, a game with the wrong FPS will feel horrible at any plataform, it’s about the game itself. And; I’m sure you heard this argument many times, you must be sick of it, already mentally preparing your rethoric to it; but games that are meant to be cinematic and not at all competitive do give a better vibe as 30 FPS than they do at 60.

The problem with the 60 framerate for this kind of composition is that 60 has too high of a fidelity to feel dramatic, it looks too real and too CRUDE, raw. Take a look a this, put at 60 FPS at youtube gear button (scroll down to the botton of the post if you wanna see the video here): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbqeuuoRHUg

While framerate enthusiast will orgasm out of their fetishism with high framerates, most neutral people will agree: it looks weird. It looks awkward. The action scenes and scenes with fast movement just look ridiculous. And not just because we’re not used to see movies this way but because we DO NOT perceive the world around us this way. We don’t see the world as 48, 60 or 90 FPS, we can perceive up to around 90 but given the way our field of view is structured and how or light receptor works we have a pretty particular way to interpret movement, movement that encompasses our whole field of view and depth perception. The image on the flat 2D screen however much movement it display is actually static our brains, it just sits there on our central vision. And so, for fast action scenes with lots of movement, we end up receving a much clearer image that we would ever receives in our daily lives, it’s like interpreting an image through the eyes of a computer instead of the eyes of an human. You can negate this effect by amplifying the motion blur but only to a certain point (let alone the fact that motion blur post processing is at terrible state right now). And this is the end result.

Dialogue sequences look too crude, like a theater interpreation, to have any drammatic impact, sometimes it even amplify the cheesyness of the whole thing, like a second grade theatre presentation.

Action and fast sequences have too much going to look real, they feel awkward and unnatural looking.

If that crude, rich and awkward feel is what your work of art needs, then going for 60 FPS is the way. For a drammatically epic presentation high FPS is NOT the way to be, it goes AGAINST the message you would be trying to phrase.

Video games work a little different, but they are a visual media regardless, and some rules apply the same. A high FPS doesn’t feel that much awkward on most high action gameplay because any kind of virtual interactive world requires a lot more of abstraction by the player than a movie observer does. It is way harder to break the immersion and the suspension of disbelief ina video game than it does in a movie. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect the whole feel of the art piece.

I’ve seen The Last of Us at 30 FPS on a PS3 and later at 60 FPS at PS4 and I can defintely say the 30 FPS version feels better to that game than the 60 FPS version, the 60 FPS version looks crude and awkward, not that much for gameplay, only if you search for it, but a lot for cutscenes and non-interactive sequences.

I’ve also felt a similar feeling with the new Doom, I have seen footage of it at a high frame rate, and while the character movement feels alright for most the time, the animations for the monsters and especially the animations of them falling apart have a very weird looking movement to them, not because of the animation itself, but because of it being at a high frame rate.

And many other games which I felt they need to be epic or drammatic I have tried to lock them at 24 or 30 FPS myself, because I feel it fits the thest of the art piece better thant he crude and richhigh framerates. I have also tried to put them in more cinema like ratio than the usual widescreen perspective (the 35mm film range I mean).

This kind of design choices don’t entail only to framerate but many other features. Not only because it is technichally superior that it is automatically artistically better. It all depends on the work of art itself and how the artist want to convey it message.

You’re lucky I’m already familiar and have read some of your sources before you brought them up, I didn’t have to read it all because I already read most of it.

But seriously, showering your oposing side with indirect sources is bad behavior in a serious discussion, it adds a lot of unrelated junk to topic at hand and masks your own comprehension of the subject. Apologizing for it doesn’t make it any better. It’s a virtual form of Strawman where you force the other side to refute other authors claims for whom you might not agree completely to begin with (amo.net and 100fps.com for
example are filled with flaws, which I don’t know if you agree or don’t), basically just making people waste their time. I politely ask that you refrain to do so again and instead write your abstract about the subject.

I didn’t watch the videos tough, they seem made for the layman, I doubt they’ll have more meaningful data than books or papers I have read on the subject.

Getting that out of the way, let’s begin

“In the first part of
your argument, you talk alot about art. […]

An oil painting is static. A movie is dynamic. A game is interactive. Very, very different things. “

I didn’t ignore the fact that games are an interactive medium. I don’t account it in my argumentation simply because it doesn’t matter. My argument isn’t about how exactly do you perceive a work of art, how exactly do you do it changes how your cognitive process will proceed to abstract the piece, but my argument isn’t about that.

It’s not HOW EXACTLY you can perceive a work of art, but HOW WELL you can perceive it.

If you want to judge a book you need to be able to read it, if you want to judge a song you need to be able to hear it, if you want to judge a movie or a picture you need to be able to see it and if you want to judge a game you need to be able to play it.

The more clear, concise and simple the writing, the easier it is to read it; the more clear and sharp a sound, the easier it is to listen; the more clean and sharp
an image, the easier it is to see it; and the more responsive a game, the easier it is to interact with it.

And that’s what I was doing, a comparison. While the cleaner, sharper and clearer an image will facilitate your judgement of a painting or picture, it doesn’t mean that all paintings and all movies need to be clean, sharp and clear. The fact that you can’t visiually identify objects very well can be very much a concious design decision of the artist, and that is the comparison, for the same logic can also apply for games. The fact that a game is not so responsive can be a decision as much as solid as the dirty and noisey picture of a painting or a sound.

Not every painting needs to be easy and clear to see and not every game needs to be fast and responsive to play. For both are valid ways to change the tone of the
pieces’ messages.

As for the rest of your comment, I’m sorry to be rude here but you seem to be out of your depth.

Michael Abrash’ work relates almost entirely to HMD and VR, and that is a indeed “whole different beast”. While the effects and problems he describes can
be replicated under standard displays, specially if you’re sitting in front of a very large LCD screen, they’re all insubstantial issues for common displays (they are very serious issues for HMD and VR, but not so much for common displays), even more if you account that most examples are all emulated simulations since most monitors can’t even get to 240hz and browsers are some times locked to low rendering performance to save processing power.

Even more than that, MA himself recognizes that simply increasing motion blur quality would fix most problems with strobing and judder, eliminating the need for high FPS and high refresh rates. But again, that relates to strobing and judder, a topic much more important for HMD and VR than it is to general gaming.

As far as high framerates in common displays go, they do add a particular tone to the visual experience that is a whole lot different than standard frame rates, they don’t add in a quantitative scale (more of the same) but rather in a qualitave aspect (whole different tone, whole different “Timbre” if you will), that’s why you can’t simply make a game “better” by just adding more frames to it, you won’t just be adding more, you’ll be adding a different tone that wasn’t there to begin with, it’s an alien tone. If you would make a color comparison, high framerate is not a different tone of the same color but a whole different color in comparison to common framerates.

And that is solely because the way we interact with the real world around us. Human visual focus and perception of movement is very particular in a way
that it is erratic (compared to a camera, that is). It’s not a continuum sucession of key timestamps, or “frames” if you will, but a progressive scan and blending of simular stimuli in one “Monad” of time sucession. This progressive scan and blending of stimuli is not linear however, the brain is constantly trying to compensate at
various different degrees by moving focus, “freezing frames”, “collapsing frames”, removing junk visual information and much else. If it wasn’t for that, our vision would be a blurry mess akin to 70s psychodelic worlds, filled with duplications and kaleidoscopic
effects.

What is important for this discussion is the Perception of Movement and Motion Blur. Natural motion blur doesn’t occur equally through the field of view,
in most daily life situations it occurs only in out of focus visual information. That is because our visual focus is very precise and can follow fast cruising objects as long as we can move our heads and eyes fast enough to our visual focus to follow the object. If a fast object moves in our field of view and is not on focus it will blur out regardless even if it crosses our visual focus. In objects that move too fast or unpredictably even focus will blur. Some other times however it will not blur because of the brain’s “frame freezing” during saccadic movements even though the object is moving at ludicrous speeds. This all sums to a very particular perception of movement that is mostly irregular and centralized.

Common viewing experience, be it cinema or games, TV or PC monitors, works indifferent conditions than real world views, because, as much movement
as there can be inside a video, the display itself is static and continually in your focus. Even for the PC visual experience, displaying video very close to your eyes, the focus and gaze shift is still minimal because the saccadic movements are too small to account for as a real world scenary would, there’s no vestibular stimuli to even account for complex image processing. And so, for natural looking videos you need to change parameters to be able to emulate a visual behavior somewhat similar to the way our vision works in the real world, and for legacy displays it will never be perfect, it will always sacrifice one element for another.

To be able to achieve a natural looking world depiction (mind that “natural” and “realistic” are differen things) you always need to have some simulated form of motion blur embedded into the video itself to convey a natural idea of movement. For cameras, that’s where the framerates come in. 30 FPS slow shutter speeds are a very sweet spots of exposition that do blur objects natively in a way very similar to how fast most humans can move their own visual focus. For cinema, 24 to 30 FPS is not just an arbitrary cultural choice but a sweet spot that developed through experience, a good balance between detail, perception of movement and focus. Cameras that shoot at higher framerates cannot perform native motion blur, only at post-processing, because to be able to shoot at such high frame rates shutter speed increases drammatically, capturing a succeding still frames with no blurring whatsoever, because the exposition is too short.

And this is the reason fast sequences look so unnatural at high framerates, the video is recorded with little to no motion blur, in and out of focus, as if our visual field was one giant focus point, and the brain will not compensate for that because the display is static, it’s not moving, there is nothing to blur out, creating a world depiction that is simply alien to our daily lives.

You can simply increase post-processing motion blur to counter act this effect (it also resolves all the problems judder and stroboscopic effects it might have), but to do so precisely would require a great amount of work with picture composition to guide the viewers saccadic movements to the right places and would kill most the “rich” information high frame rates give, making not that much different than lower framerates as the field of view would have about the same amount of “junk”
visual information.

For very realistic non-fast moving scenes high frame rates are indeed superior, they can make look like you’re actually standing on the scenary itself (as
long as it doesn’t have too much detail moving around scattared across the screen, like moving foliage and such). But for artistical purposes realism is just one of the many options of expression, and in most situations artists find it very dull.

Yes, it’s a fact that many people do like the higher framerate of “The Hobbit”, but this is not the topic at hand, it’s not wheter you prefer one or the other, this is entirely subjective, but what are the consequences and implications of one in regard to the other. The people who like The Hobbit at that framerate like it because they like the aspect it brings, not because they don’t notice such aspects. And the same goes for people who don’t like it. What I was trying to show are the aspects themselves.

And these aspects are no news. People act like high frame rates are a modern thing when actually this technology has about 40 years of history in mainstream
culture. Documentaries, TV journalism and TV shows were frequently shot and displayed at high frame rates. In fact, this crude aspect that so many people hate about high frame rates is commonly known inside the video edting industry as “The Soap Opera Effect”,
exactly because popular TV soap operas were shot with 60 FPS interpolated cameras (I’m serious, google it if you don’t believe it). High frame rates through films are known since the 60s and 70s as a very interesting way to portray dramas, and every true movie snob would know that it’s only this, it is good for drama, it doesn’t work for action movies. Everyone who truly knows their cinema passion knew Peter Jackson was talking out of his ass when promoting high frame rates, it’s old news and amateurish choice, akin to college students who hear about high frame rates for the first time and think they discovered something revolutionary, it’s patethic. High frame rates are not simply a matter of “getting used to it”.

For video games, as interactive as they are, they are also a visual stimuli and experience. I repeat, similar rules for cause and effect do apply. Cutscenes and out of control action sequences do have the exact same Soap Opera effect and unnaturally looking action sequences exactly as they do in movies. For gameplay it might add an otherworldly like effect or being overly realistic or cruse. For fantasy universes it might even feel cartoony.

Different rules as well: in video games, there is no physical camera nor anything like it, the frames are rendered as a bunch of still images in sucession; if the
rendering engine can’t include motion blur in its final renders, the image will look unnatural even at 30 FPS, worse still, they will feel “staggared” because such slow perception of movement with no blur is also unnatural, much more similar to early claymation techniques.

That’s why the first 3D games felt clunky even when they’d run at very stable 30 FPS. Regardless wheter it is 30 FPS or 60 FPS, motion blur is needed for any game to look natural at the display. 60 FPS however will need much more motion blur and more finely controlled than 30, and it still have different focus behavior and detail perception than 30, changing the focus flow and chronostasis effects. 60 FPS for “saturated“ movement is always some kind of sensory
overload.

With no motion blur, 60 FPS do “feel better” because even though they look as unnatural as 30 FPS and no motion blur, at least they don’t feel staggered.

Ultimately, it all depends on the game itself, how the artist wants to convey its message and how he wants his players to feel. Because, again, 60 FPS and 30 FPS bring completely different elements to the table. If you want simulation, the overly realistic and crude aspect high frame rates brings are a must. If you want something that just looks somewhat real but in not a simulation kind of way 30 FPS is as much as viable option. If you want cinematic and dramatic presentations 30 FPS is the way to go.

Many competitive player scums standard framerate simply because it gets on the way of their highly competitive skills, but not all games are meant to have this level of difficulty nor it’s always desirable. Racing games for example, while they do usually require a high frame rate for faster reaction times, if they have a high frame rate and no motion blur, they’re a nauseating nightmare. We cognitively know that objects
moving past us are moving at a high speed, but they don’t look that way for our brains because they have no motion blur, so you have two different stimuli saying two different things. It will get you confused, tired and sick very fast unless you can block one stimuli,effectively killing your performance. A 30 FPS version with motion
blur would still be better than a 60 FPS version with no motion blur in this case. Let alone the fact that no motion blur on a racing game kills the thrill of speed.

Even for VR, while most people think that high refresh rates and frame rates are the only way such technology is possible, a motion blur algoritm, eye tracking, frame interporlation and a good OLED display with no sample and hold behavior can give similar results as well, without the need for ridiculously high refresh rates (even John Carmack and Michael Abrash agree, they just prefer to pursuit another way).

While a relatively unknown issue, First Person games with fast movements at 60 FPS and little to no motion blur also have similar nauseating effects till your brain
learns to ignore one of the stimuli.

As for you request, again, I’ll repeat myself, it depends on the game, not the plataform. A game with the wrong FPS will feel horrible in any plataform. The Last of Us at 60 FPS would feel cheap and ridiculous on a PC as much as it does on a TV.

For PC games, the most proeminent case I remember was Alan Wake. I played it on PC and felt like I was watching a cheap soap opera at sci-fi channel or somekind of horrible B-movie just from xperiencing the gameplay alone! (the cutscenes are prerendered ar 30 FPS) I went out of my way to put a 30 FPS cap on that thing, and yes it was a nightamre to do it, as I didn’t want to change my nvidia settings I had to mod the game files to do it, and since no one out there cares for these things or mod Alan Wake, I had to do it entirely on my own, I don’t even remember how I did, I hated the game and can’t remember a thing about it now,
it was not just changing one value on a .ini file, that I remember well.

Regardless, my stance stays true, the right framerate will vary depending on the kind of elements the artists wants to pass on, and for that matter any framerate is a viable option as long as it agrees with the rest of the work. To think that every game needs to have a high frame rate, that every game gets better by just adding more frames to it, to shame and scorn games and developers which are not in high frame rates without even judging the rest of the work is just naive and
tyrannical, it kills artistic freedom. This is not a matter or “HD vs SD”, this is a matter of tones, atmospheres, perception, interaction, needs and communication, it is an artistical issue as much as it is a technichal one.

Strawman.

I said that racing game would look better and not nauseating at 30 FPS WITH MOTION BLUR than the same racing game at 60 FPS AND NO MOTION BLUR.

Seriously, you need to know the difference between dialetics and rethoric.