Why?
Sample and hold displays have innate motion blur because of how our eyes work, so motion clarity will increase even if we dont play games that hit the full 720hz
Produces motion blur that your visual system can make use of in tracking objects.
Follow-up: if you want a great example of this, you know how movies can look reasonably smooth, even though they’re maybe as low as 24 frames per second? That’s because the camera is getting an exposure over that 1/24th of a second that contains motion blur.
A YouTuber I watch started doing 60 fps video at one point. But even though there were more frames, it looked badly choppy. I believe he got a camera that could do higher frame rates that probably had a variable frame rate setting, and each “exposure” was less than 1/60th of a second. The stills were extremely crisp and clear when paused, but watching it was pretty uncomfortable, felt like it jittered, especially with rapidly-moving objects.
In theory, we probably don’t need a monitor that can do 1000 Hz or whatever. We could probably just render 1000 frames a second and then combine them virtually and send them to the monitor at a lower frame rate, and it’d probably look pretty close. Heck, if you have a particular software package that can compute a motion blur without needing to render every frame — and a lot of games have not-so-good “motion blur” that try to simulate this — then you wouldn’t even need to render all the frames.
But this is a simple way to get an accurate motion blur that will work with pretty much all software.
Humans have an innate drive to push and challenge, to go beyond. However the machinery is all just garbled. It’s designed for good functioning in a simple and natural environment, but circumstances have placed it in a wild and complicated place that is far beyond anything it was designed for. It’s like if you dropped an automated space probe designed for rocky soil and vaccum into an alien jungle, and it somehow worked. On the one hand, it’s a testament to its good design in the first place that it’s wandering around doing some approximation of its stuff. But, on the other hand, you know it’s going to fuck up and mishandle some situations because it’s just not designed for that.
In this case, almost all of that drive to go beyond is being applied to incredibly frivolous and pointless projects. Almost all of the benefit (even in the weird sense that the pointless projects even have a benefit) gets given to someone else. People just keep coming in every day and building stuff, basically to no purpose. Web marketing? 720Hz? A game that will benefit no one to play? Effective propaganda to delay action on climate change? Deceptive advertising for toddlers? Oxycontin? Sure, sounds good, here’s your paycheck. Even the people running the system have basically no idea why they’re even doing the stuff they’re doing. They’re just wandering around doing their programming, probably most of their focus is on family or some other kind of activity anyway. The fact that there’s something else they could be doing doesn’t even really occur to them, or comes only as a passing thought, or starts to hit them once the whole thing is at its end.
Anyway, we’re about to hit the point where this is all unsustainable. We’ll either unfuck our priorities, take an active role in setting up the systems of effort and action in some way that’s oriented towards making a livable environment for ourselves and a future, and mitigating the catastrophes we’ve set up for ourselves by running on autopilot up until this point, or we won’t survive.
But, in the meantime, we have 720Hz monitors, so there’s that.
Because gamers will pay stupid money for bragging rights.
Some games still tie code to the FPS/Polling rate lol.
I can shoot more in Elite Dangerous at 240hz than someone playing at 60hz.
That’s what the Turbo button on old 486 computers used to be for. Some games were initially tied to the clock and then then clock started getting too fast, so the button was there to under clock the processor so games were playable. Tron light cycles were hilarious without turbo turned off.
Yeah, the territory of diminishing returns.
