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Comment by seandougall | Hacker News Reader

24fps is what's needed for film, because it's fast enough for persistence of vision to carry one frame's image over to the next while the shutter is closed. And in film, motion usually gets smoothed by the non-zero exposure time. If video games could employ sophisticated motion blur, they could generally get by with 24fps as well.

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24fps is not based on persistence of vision. Persistence of vision exists at 23fps or 22fps and lower for some people. 24fps is an historical artifact of the first few generations of motion picture technology. It is maintained because humanity has grown accustomed to 24fps in theaters for film material. With the advent of video (video tape) and prolific 30fps material (60i material), many people perceive film shot at 30fps to be video and vice versa.

Ultimately, it is an aesthetic.

24 fps is barely acceptable. Forget fast pans and any other fast camera movement. Increasing that number will be hard, though, because over decades we learned to associate 24 fps with cinematic quality and higher frame rates with cheapo camcorders.

Not really. Actually I think the GP was mistaken. The big reason gamers don't want 24FPS is because if it's 24FPS during normal play, it's gonna stutter. There will be times when it goes down to, say, 12 FPS, if not lower. And 12 FPS is simply not good enough for anything.

And of course, there's one thing about employing sophisticated motion blur-- you're not going to do it just to lower FPS. Real motion blur is quite expensive. There's really no point except for the visual coolness.

A lot of my film buff friends claim that films with higher than 24 fps look a lot better. There's a kind of format called Maxivision that can be projected 48:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxivision

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