Motion blur and the never ending debate...

[Dr Gonzo]

I was looking at the new Crysis pics and a thought that had been nagging me pushed me to start a new thread. Sorry if this doesn't quite fit here but it relates to gaming and gamers,

With all new next-gen games having true motion blur, will the fabled 60-100 FPS mark be necessary anymore? I mean, the whole idea of getting 60 FPS is for it to be totally smooth, but the whole reason that tv and dvd looks so smooth at only 25 or 29.97 FPS is that every other frame is blurred.

The way i see it, if games are creating that motion blur, it will, overall, make the gameplay seem much smoother even though it may only be running at 25 FPS.

If you want to see this for yourself, run the Trackmania Nations benchmark and look at how smooth it looks like it's running doing the maximum GFX test with motion blur despite the fact that it runs at about 25 FPS (obviously this will differ depending on hardware).

What are your thoughts?

i apologise for any punctuation, grammar etc errors but inmy defense it's 2am and i can't sleep.

[metroidfox]

No motion blur does not make a difference. 60 will be smoother than 24 which is playable anyways if it is constant.

[Roxen]

Depends on the game, I don't know if motion blur has anything to do with it, but some games just feel smoother even at 20-30fps than others, probably depends on how movement is affected by the fps.

[Dr Gonzo]

Originally Posted by metroidfox

No motion blur does not make a difference. 60 will be smoother than 24 which is playable anyways if it is constant.

Well of course 60 will be smoother, but my argument is that jigginess will be much less noticable if every other frame is blurred. Also i guess, it depends on how the motion blur is utilised because obviously not everything is going to be using it, probably only quick movements...hmm, i think i've just debunked my own theory.

[dawdler]

Originally Posted by SirRoxen

Depends on the game, I don't know if motion blur has anything to do with it, but some games just feel smoother even at 20-30fps than others, probably depends on how movement is affected by the fps.

Wouldnt that be how fps is affected by movement instead?

A rock-solid 30 fps (as in never go above, never go below, 30 fps, period) will appear quite smooth.

The problem is when the game varies between 5 and 200 fps all the time.

[SubCog]

60 frames will always be better for faster paced games. Imagine playing a fast game like quake3 with 24 fps and motion blur. Per each frame, enemies will be represented as a blur of colors. Within the length of this blur, which may be several times the size of the player, there is simply no way to distinguish where the enemy is. The fact is that while motion blur looks nifty, it does not add data.

[Roxen]

Originally Posted by dawdler

Wouldnt that be how fps is affected by movement instead?

A rock-solid 30 fps (as in never go above, never go below, 30 fps, period) will appear quite smooth.

The problem is when the game varies between 5 and 200 fps all the time.

No I don't think so, Quake 3 is a great example. For some odd reason, at certain fps's like 125 and 333, you can generate speed more quickly. 30fps is not smooth enough for most the games I play, especially quake 4. If I were at 30fps I wouldn't be competitive at all.

[Scott]

I can see where motion blur in a racing game is going to smooth out the gameplay, the motion that's being blurred is very predictable (game knows you have to go this way down a track).

In a FPS it's going to be much harder to blur properly because the movement is much less predictable. If anything, the blur is going to make things possible worse with framerates dropping to accomodate blur in a less predictable environment.

IMO

[Drexion]

Yes, 60+ FPS will still be wanted by most.

The reason is that motion blur in a movie is not the same as the simulated motion blur in a videogame.

The movie's blur works similar to the what the human eye would see as if he were watching the events in real life.
The game's blur works based on an exact algorithm which seeks to simulate real life blur.

Take one frame from a movie's blur, and one frame from a game's blur, and you will notice the game's blur is still an exact formula wherein lies the problem. In the future when devs can better simulate what the eye sees (which a movie camera does MUCH better than video game algorithms) then yes we can settle for less FPS, but for now no, we will still need 60+ as the blur in games is still too exact to a formula. "Exact" is the best word I can think of that will fit the scenario.

[Crawdaddy79]

Motion blur does not effect my ability to realize the game I'm playing is choppy. It gives a slightly smoother presentation, true... But the choppiness will annoy me all the same.

[phial]

argh you guys!!! 30fps is NOT SMOOTH! the only reason 30fps on a TV looks smooth is because its interlaced so 60fps EFFECTIVE... I have never in my life played a game that felt smooth below 40fps , compared to how it feels at 60+

edit: so far in games that have motion blur and "full screen glow effects" like WoW, I have turned them all off due to making it harder to see distant objects, which can mean the difference between playing well and playing poorly.

[Crawdaddy79]

Originally Posted by phial

30fps is NOT SMOOTH!

Yes it is.


EDIT:

Originally Posted by phial

the only reason 30fps on a TV looks smooth is because its interlaced so 60fps EFFECTIVE...

What a silly thing to say. A game running at 30FPS on a television will not "feel" like it's running at 60FPS. Doom on the Atari Jaguar is a perfect example of this.

[moondogg]

Just use an LCD if you want motion blur

Originally Posted by Crawdaddy79

Yes it is.

maybe for video, but not gaming.

[phial]

I must have really good eyesight or something because I can literally see the frames ticking by at 30fps, its that choppy. I cant stand going to the movie theatre either because of how noticeable the framerates are on those huge projection screens.

[Nitz Walsh]

Originally Posted by Crawdaddy79

Yes it is.

No, it isn't.

I win!

[NonSoft]

Originally Posted by phial

I must have really good eyesight or something because I can literally see the frames ticking by at 30fps, its that choppy. I cant stand going to the movie theatre either because of how noticeable the framerates are on those huge projection screens.

[Crawdaddy79]

Originally Posted by Nitz Walsh

No, it isn't.

Yes it is.

Originally Posted by Nitz Walsh

I win!

If by "win" you mean "lose", then yes I agree.

[Pr()ZaC]

Originally Posted by phial

I cant stand going to the movie theatre either because of how noticeable the framerates are on those huge projection screens.

That's becuase movies use a standard 24FPS rate.

I can't stand motion blur on driving games for example, but it would be sweet in a fighting game.

[phial]

yea i know, thats why i said it

[Pr()ZaC]

Not exactly, no

[SubCog]

Originally Posted by phial

argh you guys!!! 30fps is NOT SMOOTH! the only reason 30fps on a TV looks smooth is because its interlaced so 60fps EFFECTIVE... I have never in my life played a game that felt smooth below 40fps , compared to how it feels at 60+

The reason console games are smooth at 30 fps is because the lookspeed is much slower when you use a thumbstick instead of a mouse.

[SubCog]

just for the sake of argument, if you had ANY scene in ANY movie where you had the camera turning at the speed most of us look around in any given first person shooter title, the scene would be incredibly disorienting. You NEVER see that kind of camera movement in 24, or even 30 fps movie or tv program.

[bigtabs]

[Twinke Masta]

oh, I'm sorry, just one moment. Is this a five minute argument or the full half hour?

[GoldenNugget]

motion blur works well in certain games. For example it was great in the free game penumbra.

[soylent]

The big problem with motion blur in games is that you're looking at a screen and your eyes aren't controlling the camera. Your eyes are EXTREMELY good at tracking fast moving objects for short periods of time to resolve them in high detail instead of a blurry mess(You can even see the sharp silhouette of individual helicopter blades against sky pop up from what looks like a semi-opaque circular disk. And a typical helicopter blade does about 5-10 rotations per second).

With motion blur you will not be able to do this with your eyes, you need to track objects with your mouse. That's not always a problem as you're going to want to aim at things anyway in something like an FPS.

Overall I think properly done motion blur(with blur distance capped to correspond to say 60 FPS and higher so you won't notice massive blur if your framerate dips) will be nice.

[felikx]

Originally Posted by Dr Gonzo

I was looking at the new Crysis pics and a thought that had been nagging me pushed me to start a new thread. Sorry if this doesn't quite fit here but it relates to gaming and gamers,

With all new next-gen games having true motion blur, will the fabled 60-100 FPS mark be necessary anymore? I mean, the whole idea of getting 60 FPS is for it to be totally smooth, but the whole reason that tv and dvd looks so smooth at only 25 or 29.97 FPS is that every other frame is blurred.

The way i see it, if games are creating that motion blur, it will, overall, make the gameplay seem much smoother even though it may only be running at 25 FPS.

If you want to see this for yourself, run the Trackmania Nations benchmark and look at how smooth it looks like it's running doing the maximum GFX test with motion blur despite the fact that it runs at about 25 FPS (obviously this will differ depending on hardware).

What are your thoughts?

i apologise for any punctuation, grammar etc errors but inmy defense it's 2am and i can't sleep.

DVDs look like **** at 23.967 because of the low framerate. So do movies in theaters. I can't stand anything below 80, and since I have a slow computer I'm pissed off a lot, hehe. But yeah, the motion blur does help the movies... would movies look dramatic if you could actually see what's going on in the action scenes at say 60 fps? Of course not. You'd see all the imperfections that get washed over in post-production.

Games need 60+, movies should stay where they are (unless it's CG or something)

[felikx]

Originally Posted by Crawdaddy79

Yes it is.


EDIT:


What a silly thing to say. A game running at 30FPS on a television will not "feel" like it's running at 60FPS. Doom on the Atari Jaguar is a perfect example of this.

30 fps is NOT SMOOTH. Not at all! Any real gamer can tell the difference between 60 and 80 and 100 fps after less than a second of fast paced action.

[{WOR}lock]

Your talking about interlacing the video game frames.
It's not motion blur at all in the sense that developers use in games today.

Interlacing works good on old TVs, but when it comes to anything modern, then there's all the technology involved in deinterlacing the image. Which really only fakes the missing frames by taking infomation from the two adjacent frames.

Sounds like a long path to take to get to what we can already do @ 60fps.

[eatyour1337ies]

Motion blur at low framerates works fine until you start issuing commands via mouse, keyboard, or joytoy/controller A good example is the game for the PS2 title Shadow of the Colossus. Although a very good game IMO, and it has one of the best implementations of motion blur I've ever seen in a game, the average framerate felt around 15-20 fps and dipped quite often under 10 fps which made it fairly difficult to take those big lummoxes down sometimes. Also a major drawback of proper real-time motion blur that I can see is that the framerate is chopped in half because the GPU or CPU has to compare the two most current frames and determine which direction to apply the blur, and in the 3D space, which objects according to distance get what amount of blur. With that extra lag, especially with an extra frame of lag using triple buffering when VSync is in the picture (16ms for 60Hz), it can get annoying to play.

Unless there is some special technique of proper motion blur, I don't see it being all that practical in gaming (that RPG FPS game, I forget the name had a high-res video of its RT motion blur which looks promising though).

A rock-solid 30 fps (as in never go above, never go below, 30 fps, period) will appear quite smooth.

The problem is when the game varies between 5 and 200 fps all the time.

I agree wholeheartedly on the variance issue, I would much rather play a straight 30fps in any type of game rather than say 70 average that dips into the teens. However, the first part of the above quote is subjective. I invite you to check this out. Set to 30fps on one side and 60fps on the other and both are locked at their respective framerates, I can easily see the difference in smoothness. (edit- I realize now the difference between "quite smooth" and someone from past debates spouting "no difference" sorry about that, jumped the gun. I am mainly an advocate for high framerates when using mice as the aiming device in FPS, to a lesser degree TPS, and not so much RTS because the framerate plays a big role in playability with mice IME. Console games are fine at 30fps IMO but I can't stand it when I'm mousing an FPS and the framerate dips below the mid thirties and I really prefer about 50 or more and at least 60 in online FPS.)