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Comment by mcmillion | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Anything less than this becomes perceptible and starts to make the UX feel janky or sluggish. That is a huge turn-off for a lot of users, even if they can't pin down the exact cause being low framerate.

And framerate in UI is a different beast compared to video. A menu animation running at 24fps feels much choppier and sluggish than a video running at 24fps.

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No. The amount of fames you need depends on the distance an object moves per frame.

I really don't want to argue about this so I figured I just let you experience it yourself: http://jsbin.com/qizatugepo/1/edit?js,output

Frame drops are a different story entirely. The swap_control_tear extension for OpenGL takes care of that to some degree though.

Typically in a mobile app I'm flick scrolling at speed through lists. So the maximum distance travelled per frame is pretty high.

Same here. I was trying to point out that frames per second alone isn't a useful metric for "animation quality." Ideally, you'd want to compare the frames per second to how many pixel something moves per second (or something similar).

Having said that, shooting for your monitors refresh rate isn't a bad idea — it's just that you could use those cycles (and watts) for something else. And even worse, if your app is running at 60 fps most of the time but drops to 30 fps every now and then, then it's gonna look a lot worse than the one that runs at 30 fps consistently.

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