um - probably the most fantastic discussion questions arround here in months. There is so much information in this simple questions i want to burst.
ESPCIALLY because you used the word smooth.
random information:
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if you put air force pilots in a dark room and flash a light for a small ammount of time and ask if they can see the light or not, most are able to see up to 1 / 300- 1 / 600 of a second flash of light.
Television sets which are plugged into the wall in the USA get electricity at 60Hz and so with interleaving every other line it was simple for blakc and white TV's to run at 30 FPS. The addidion of color for some reason made this number 29.97 FPS (current TV's)
I believe Movies at the theater are 32 FPS via projector. Similarly to TV's, DVD, VHS, etc these are all low FPS. The industry adds a motion blur to each frame to trick your brin into interpreting a fuzzy picture as a clear one. For fun, pop in your favorite action DVD and right as some person, car, grenade or whatever object is flying accross the screen pause it. Its a blurry mess for everything in motion. Pause anyframe in cloverfield for example.
Now, lets try 60 FPS and take out the blur - for many people with CRT's they used to run at 60 Hz (pretty much the same as FPS) and things look smoothish.
Change your CRT to 60 Hz and an untrained eye may say 'looks ok'. Now open and maximize notepad or any white application. Then hold a very white piece of paper up next to your monitor and star at the paper. You can see your screen blink at you.
Although people may not notice it right off, running at 60 Hz is why many people get headaches after using the computer for an hour. In GreenMonkey's experiance the average person on average will see constant immages when running at a number at or higher than 72 Hz (or 72 FPS).
For games, running at 60 FPS may be unnoticable to you because you dont look for it, and as long as your monitor is higher than 72Hz you wont get a headache so who cares? nobody just you of course! Everybody is different and some people cant see differences past 45 some can see up to 120 FPS but in reality it turns out that the majority of people are average. Who knew.
To complicate things more you said "smooth', well even if you get 700 FPS - your monitor is probably running at 85Hz, which means your video card may be changing the signal 700 times per second, but your monitor is only changing it's immage 85 times per second. This missmatch can cause weird things to happen as 20% of the lines on your screen may be from when the rocket was to yoru left, 20% dead ahead and the rest from after it went by you. The problem? your screen shows all 3 at once. NOW - rockets do not move that fast in game for that to be a reality, but moving your mouse really fast can cause that to happen.
Plus now you can have aliasing and all kinds of other things happan when you watch the corners of walls moving accross your screen really fast. I'm not getting into those types of problems but in order to get a smooth immage understand that FPS is only a part of the issue.
