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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2026
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How many FPS does it take to satisfy the human eye? Why would adding more than that matter, if there is a limit? Is it just the puffery of salesmanship?
To actually give you a honest reply. 24 roughly.
Persistence of vision starts to kick in around 24 fps. The human eye then can tell difference up to a few hundred fps with reduced returns as you go up. Around 400-800 fps depending on age, gender and and a few other factors you lose the ability to tell detail, then color, then motion then anything but if light is on or off. Eventually at high enough fps you even lose that ability.
The US Air Force actually did lots of studies on this back in the day most are floating around.
The simple result was that 24-30 fps is 99.999% enough for anyone to have motion be understandable and smooth with various levels of improvement up to only about 200 fps in extremely rare and specific cases.
Mind you this is based on testing that was done on crts. So led and other display techs vary to differing degrees. But everything and everyone kinda tops out around 100ish for any real benefits till you get into specific niche cases.
This is a great answer. Thanks!
No that's a fucking myth. It's a minimum for a film making but that's completely irrelevant for computer graphics.
It depends on the person and the application.
For most people, when it comes to film, 24 frames a second is the minimum necessary for it to be perceived as fluid motion.
With a video game, where the user controls the input, 30 frames per second is typically the minimum target necessary for fluid motion; but personally, I only see it become truly fluid at 60 or more.
You can certainly see a lot more than that and reality doesn't really operate on frames per second, so there's no way to know how many FPS becomes more than you'd ever perceive.
There is a way! The us air force studies this decades ago. It's not all that unknown at all and basically never has been.
It's just no one actually gives the topic honest consideration and basically just memes ruining any real chance at explanation.
Something to think about. What I'm getting is FPS for analog and FPS plus "refresh rate" for digital.
Refresh rate and FPS are basically the same exact thing but one is the GPU and the other is the display, and it's a thing on analogue displays, too. CRTs actually have a higher refresh rate than modern displays as well as near infinite resolutions.
Damn. I was so close. Thank!
For many games the lower limit is 30 FPS for it to feel not like a slideshow. 60 is considered mostly smooth. Up from that it will feel smoother a nice achievable swetspot is 90-120 FPS. Everything above that is only really useful for esports.
I used to play software Quake 1 on a POS Cyrix (remember them?) PR133 x86 clone. 30fps + 200-250ms ping. 30fps felt fine bit the lag was miserable until QW came out.
It depends on the game.
Chess is playable on 1 FPS, Snake and Pong are probably playable at 10-15 fps, most games where you move your character are playable with slowdown around half speed (30 FPS), and slowdown is hardly noticeable on the 50 FPS column unless the game is very time-precise or it's being speedran
Depends on the player, many players can notice improvements up to the 100+ FPS range, so if the hardware supports it that would probably become the default at some point in future.