The first 3D first-person shooter game for a personal computer, 3D Monster Maze, had a frame rate of approximately 6 FPS, and was still a success. In modern action-oriented games where players must visually track animated objects and react quickly, frame rates of between 30 to 100+ FPS are considered acceptable by most, though this can vary significantly from game to game. Modern action games, including popular console shooters such as Halo 3, are locked at 30 FPS maximum, while others, such as Unreal Tournament 3, can run well in excess of 100 FPS on sufficient hardware. The frame rate within games varies considerably depending upon what is currently happening at a given moment, or with the hardware configuration (especially in PC games.) When the computation of a frame consumes more time than is alloted between frames, the framerate decreases.
A culture of competition has arisen among game enthusiasts with regards to frame rates, with players striving to obtain the highest FPS possible, due to their utility in demonstrating a system's power and efficiency. Indeed, many benchmarks (such as 3DMark) released by the marketing departments of hardware manufacturers and published in hardware reviews focus on the FPS measurement. Even though the typical LCD monitors of today are locked at 60 FPS, making extremely high framerates impossible to see in realtime, playthroughs of game “timedemos” at hundreds or thousands of FPS for benchmarking purposes are still common.
Beyond measurement and bragging rights, such exercises do have practical bearing in some cases. A certain amount of discarded “headroom” frames are beneficial for the elimination of uneven (“choppy” or “jumpy”) output, and to prevent FPS from plummeting during the intense sequences when players need smooth feedback most.
Aside from framerate, a separate but related factor unique to interactive applications such as gaming is latency. Excessive preprocessing can result in a noticeable delay between player commands and computer feedback, even when a full framerate is maintained, often referred to as input lag.
Without realistic motion blurring, video games and computer animations would not look as fluid as on film even with the same frame rate. When a fast moving object is present on two consecutive frames there is inevitably a gap between the images on the two frames which can contribute to a noticeable separation of the object and its afterimage left in the eye. Motion blurring helps to mitigate this effect since it tends to reduce this image gap when the two frames are strung together (the effect of motion blurring is essentially superimposing multiple images of the fast-moving object on a single frame). The result is that the motion becomes more fluid to the human eye even as the image of the object becomes blurry on each individual frame.
A high framerate still doesn't guarantee fluid movements, especially on hardware with more than one GPU. The Effect is known as micro stuttering.
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