@pauliewalnuts4451 Some will certainly still believe this in 20 years. Real information spread slowly in our current attention economy, everyone always distracted..
Thank god someone made an actually good video about this, people have been saying that you can't see above X frame rate for so long and it makes no sense.
@kristoffseisler2163 I don't know man. It depends on what type of games you're playing. At 60hz is not only the lack of motion clarity that matters but the input lag as well. Maybe for single player games. But anyone who plays competitive shooters is going to take the 240hz monitor no matter how bottom of the pack it ends up being.
i went from a 60hz to 165hz monitor and i easily saw the difference. it was so great. now when i go back to 60hz, i can instantly tell and think its slow and "laggy"
@Descending-melodies. Yeah at home I use mainly 144hz and at work I only use 60hz. I notice the difference, for work 60 is fine. Even for games 60 is fine if it's not super fast paced, as long as it's smooth. But for fast paced shooters I even hate playing at 120 if I normally get 144 lol.
@RenFujiisan yeah though this organic fiber is so slimy and slippery that I dropped it a dozen times before successfully inserting it, and not only that, it took a couple months to install the firmware, but when it works you'll have one of the best screen in the market, 1/10 cuz it's hard to install, you'd think such an expensive thing would be plug and play, Oh yeah don't buy ieye, it has planned obsolescence built in, some people have the lens becoming white after 5 years of use, though they are easier to install, I also heard they're better eyes, with 4 cones instead of three, 100/20, binocular sensor fusion, but I don't have the money for it
Impossible to accurately demonstrate.... It's your entire trillions of synaptic responses which include the visual information we see, but how each of us process that information differently... So....it's like trying to have enough pencil to calculate the entirety of all mass, energy ,etc. Just in our universe...the pencil's mass would exceed the total mass of the universe itself as the equation could be written on an infinite sized piece of paper
Good ballpark. Thanks for using our data. I love to talk about the Four Elements (Four Thresholds), of approximate orders of magnitude. [1of4] ... 10 - slideshows turns into motion; [2of4] ... 100 - flicker ceases to be visible (Talbot Plateau Theorem) [3of4] ... 1000 - (at GtG=0.0) motion blur ceases to be visible for small-FOV 1080p screens (smaller than a gaming monitor) [4of4] ... 10000 - motion blur and stroboscopics cease to be visible for wide-FOV retina resolution screens.
I hope I am alive & we're still legally allowed to own our own computer hardware by the time monitor technology reaches, & evolves beyond, the 4th* threshold (& also for it to be obtainable for less than 10% of the median household income of wherever I am living) *edit: "last" -> "4th" - bc I accept that the 4th order of magnitude might just be 2100's 1080p 60fps*
Why is the PWM effect not discussed more, even in this video? Seems we downgraded our tech for marketing so they can sell you something new but the old tech was better? I want to get a PWM monitor and even if I want to I can't which is weird? We got rid of that so we can justify paying even more for GPUs? Because some people cried it's bad for your eyes when I never once noticed or had eye fatigue from it but now I suffer because somebody else found it uncomfortable.
@Eskimo-x5b for me i can see the pwm effect easily on many oled displays and lcds too (if they have pwm that is, its mostly oleds + cheaper lcds that use pwm backlighting), but it doesnt hurt my eyes, then again 60 hz on a crt doesnt really hurt my eyes either (which is what im looking at right now), though its a bit flickery, its alright when you pretend it doesnt exist and you just watch videos and stuff
This is the video that we've needed for years. Someone who actually interprets the science correctly instead of seeing a number without reading anything else and going around for years telling people that number with zero context. This is the first video I have ever used the hype feature on, and I hope more people do the same.
He didn't just interpret the science. He DID the science. Science is experimenting and learning from the real world, and we need more of that. He did flicker tests on his own monitor, that's more than any of us.
My experience with that, is modern Windows will automatically use a higher frequency if available. I did have Nvidia set my screen back to 60Hz after enabling Gsync.
even Linux selects the highest (preferred) refresh rate automatically, why would windows make you select manually? microslop can probably vibecode an automatic check for monitor refresh rate. ...looks like windows needs a whole "copilot + pc" LLM 🤮, spyware and telemetry, and even then it can't automatically detect the refresh rate.
@PeterParker-cb7tr This is partially correct modern builds of windows will default to higher refresh rates on some displays but you don't always get the maximum available and it varies a lot monitor to monitor due to differences in their edid data amongst other factors. (The good news is newer displays tend to have the right flags set so this issue should resolve itself over time)
Yeah I knew those people were full of it! My monitor sometimes drops from 144 to 60 with windows updates and I can tell instantly when it happens. “bUt ThE hUMaN eYe CaNt SeE mOrE tHaN 60 Hz HeRp DeRp”
Does your friend think that the perceived difference is placebo or something because I can immediately tell the difference between 120hz vs 175hz let alone 60 to 120 its not even a smoothness thing for me its the input lag difference it makes with the mouse
@jamiealeksic8428 not only the input lag. You can have very low input lag with 120 Hz, but 240 Hz can be much smoother on quick response panels such as OLED.
@cashews1000 yes, but some TN panels still have high response rate, so it depends on the panel. OLEDs on the other hand almost never have stretched response time
@TyrianHaze I always have latency issues even while using a cord on dolphin emulator. I actually got really good latency while doing twilight princess on my phone with dolphin emulator. But latency is just normal for emulators.
@REL10000 Well, that's a problem external to the display technology being employed. The emulator is baseline latency, and the display technology is latency on top of that. There's latency throughout the entire chain of display, inputs, and processing, but ultimately you can tweak the variables to lower latency with a better display, inputs, and possibly faster PC to emulate faster.
I remember once seeing discussions about flickering due to people that have visual problems, some people can't really use phones because they can see the flickering and their eyes hurt even though most people can't really notice it, that's one of the big reasons why there's market for e-ink screens without backlights so you can have screens with 0 flickering
That's mostly an OLED problem. When the brightness of an OLED pixel gets low it starts to color shift. To stop this manufactures flicker the pixel to make it appear dimmer. Problem was they chose 240hz which as this video shows is too low for many people. Most have bumped it to at least 480hz though some are over 2000.
@draco10111b Sample and hold. It's not really about the flicker at all, it's that the motion will never be correct in a sample and hold display and the lower the frame rate, the more that's apparent. This is why a 60hz CRT monitor is perfectly smooth with it's scanning raster whilst 240hz Oled looks noticeably more choppy
@FX3T in a way it’s even worse - I can’t actually perceive the flickering directly right away, but without fail I get major eyestrain and a headache within 10-20 minutes of using an OLED phone with low PWM dimming frequency (most phones have 240Hz or even worse, used to be 120Hz on/off cycles to control brightness). As you can imagine, this makes most modern phones unusable!
This is a real problem for science in general. Humans are common enough to make the law of big numbers relevant. If everything is a bell curve, then that person who can see a 500Hz flicker exists. I am also someone who can perceive a flicker into the 150+Hz range...in the form of a headache.
@Kynatosh well JACK is an option too though no game explicitly advertises usage of either JACK or ASIO (except for games like osu!), SDL and OpenAL allow JACK backends
9:29 yeah because the camera captures stuff at lower framerate its also why you can sometimes see a video of a flying helicopter with a propeller that looks still or if you look at accelerated car's wheels you can see that the wheel rotation accelerates at first then slows down but the car actually was only speeding up in that time period. also strobing lights make it look like everything is happening slower than usual
BE AWARE: The flicker test can cause a similar effect to burn in on LCDs. To remove said effect, turn the monitor off, or display a full white image for about 5 minutes. This should almost completely resolve the issue, the rest will be gone with time.
LCDs normally alternate electrical polarity of every pixel every frame so it averages out to 0. This avoids some burn-in effects that are caused by an electrical charge imbalance that doesn't average out to 0. This works for a normal image because it's +white one frame, -white the next frame, or it's +black the next frame, -black the next frame. But when you do the flicker test, you're alternating black and white frames at the same time the LCD is alternating polarity, so it's +white, -black, +white, -black, and that doesn't average out to 0 and doesn't cancel out the burn-in effect. (which is what it was trying to avoid by alternating). If it did +white, +black, -white, -black it would average out, but that's not what they do, they alternate every single frame. You wouldn't notice if you were doing a single-color flicker test, because the whole screen would just be a little brighter or darker than before, but when it's a checkerboard it's noticeable. Fortunately, it's temporary. Another fun fact: due to imperfect electronics, the + and - aren't precisely balanced, so the LCD alternates polarity every line or pixel as well, so a + pixel is next to a - pixel and you see the average. There are test patterns online that alternate black pixels next to white pixels, so +black, -white, +black and on the next frame -black, +white, -black, and then they don't have +white next to -white and you can see a flicker. This test doesn't cause burn-in because each separate pixel is still balanced, you just see a visual flicker even though the picture isn't changing.
This is especially seen in IPS panels. The older ones from Panasonic were pretty immune, but LG, AUO and Chinese made panels can exhibit this "image sticking" or "retention" pretty bad. 5 minutes of full white may not be enough, but it will disappear in the end.
@thewhitefalcon8539 this is really helpful. I just wrote that Panasonic panels don't seem as prone to this as some others. Maybe they use a different driving algorithm.
@fornax985 i remember when the limit was 30hz lol (argument used by console peasants 10-15 years ago) one of my irl friend used that argument years ago before switching to pc and changing his entire view
I have to wonder whether it's a coincidence that this aligns pretty closely with our audio bandwidth. Is 20kHz a neural architecture limit, while the 20-something Hz used for film (suspiciously similar to the lower edge of what we perceive as pitch) is our typical scene assembly rate, a computational constraint? The stroboscopic effect is spatial rather than temporal, though. If you imagine a blinking pixel “moving” sideways across your field of view, for _any_ frequency of flicker there is a corresponding rate of travel that results in alternate pixels being illuminated, which would then become visible as a dotted line if the pixels were bright enough. You need to add computed blur (a spatiotemporal LPF…) to eliminate this sampling effect. Anyway, as someone who has gone their whole life being driven buggy by blinking lights and choppy animations that are supposedly “easily good enough” I thank you for publishing this explainer.
@SixToughI was trying to be clear by using Hz for a cycle time constraint, as opposed to phase resolution. I am not a neurologist, and I don't know the unit conventions of that field, but I don't think I've screwed up my dimensional analysis.
@SixTough Oh, sorry, I misread and/or misunderstood you. But audio equipment is usually specced for a band of 20Hz-20kHz, which is a little optimistic for adults. Proper speakers can certainly oscillate at that frequency, which is why they have tweeters, and why consumer audio is typically recorded at a sample rate of 44.1 or 48kHz (Nyquist's theorem accounting for the extra factor of 2). It could all be a coincidence, but it struck me as interesting to see a similar range.
@stephenspackman5573 yeah I like your point, I'm just saying the 20kHz is in oscillation not in a discrete event, it's not often brought up, maybe you will find it interesting
I genuinely wonder if one of the reasons why so many people seem to think that you can't see past 60hz is solely because Windows always defaults to 60hz even when your monitor is capable of higher and they just never thought/knew to change their monitor settings. I've seen people on forums and in monitor reviews complaining that they didn't see any difference after upgrading from a 60hz monitor only to later realise that they never increased their refresh rate from 60hz in their display settings.
Doesn't help that Windows for some reason puts the refresh rate in the advance tab instead of with the resolution. It's even stranger when you consider on CRT's refresh rate and resolution are tied to one another. Why did they do it that way?
2:58 Thank you for your editing! This did the same thing as a slow zoom (forces your eye to refocus, usually on the center), but without the issues of a slow zoom. I have trouble with the slow zooms in. I can handle rapid changes, but a slow zoom can give me a migrane. Go figure.
funnily, where I'm from, that's how you would write 39 Hz (with 3 decimal places), and not 39 THOUSAND Hz. To me it felt super click baity, because I was convinced it was not true xD
It's crazy how much propaganda was happening back then with people saying people can't see more than 60hz. This is why I dont trust shit on the internet
15:40 I'm glad to see mention of the phantom array effect (where you move your line of sight and a trail of strobing patterns are left behind by LEDs, commonly seen in car brake lights, LED projectors, and so on) It's one of those things where sure, you might not be able to 'see' a 500Hz flicker by staring straight at it, but then as soon as you look elsewhere, or look past it, or it moves relevant to your frame of vision, the flicker becomes very noticeable.
@cenkkinqzzzz3002this is a geometry dash player. Aeternus is a top 0 level. Verifying in the community means being the first person to beat a level. It is a level with a lot of 60 fps frame perfects.
@TheVindictiveLurker Damn this is a throwback also I just looked this up and Idk what kind of drugs Geometry Dash players are taking I remember playing the game a long time ago when it was blowing up but this is insane levels of joblessness lmao how is this even possible
Also interesting to note that the eye is made of different regions, the center of the eye having clearer vision than what we see from the outer areas (what we'd consider peripheral vision). Plus, there are limits to our vision which is actually due to our brain's processing, not the eye itself.
That's also why VR uses foveated rendering, Only renders what you look at directly in full resolution. I wonder if anyone ever did this for normal games. Just point a camera at your face and it would work, and could potentially save lots of processing to be put into more real FPS.
The only use for that study is for those who haven't move on from their 60hz monitor and then use that as an excuse to justify what they feel, "human eyes can only see 60hz, so there is no difference to go beyond that, I'm not paying more to get the same" said someone who never feel the smoothness of 144hz
Dude wtf I used the webapp you linked and now the checkerboard pattern persists on my screen even after I've restarted my computer, my screen was even flickering while starting up, it's been a couple of minutes now and I can still see the pattern
Ah yeah, that's temporay image retention. Some monitors get this from these test patterns. The testufo sync track does that too on some monitors. Goes away after a couple of minutes, but you can also speed things up by running this full screen: www.shadertoy.com/view/tdXXRM
Its been known for decades that the human eye can see faster than 60hz. Military testing showed pilots could identify specific plane models from images that were flashed for less than 1/600 of a second.
As of today (February 2026). This is now the single best video on motion portrayal available on RUclips. I can confirm everything is correct as a huge motion portrayal nerd.
Well yeah but past 120Hz there is zero difference to my eyes. Some people say that they can see the difference between 120hz and 144hz but that's just bullshit.
@JesseOrSomething Did you watch the video? The difference in the strobe effect is massive, for a while because of MOBO bios issue my 180hz was capped at 144hz, and my god, there's a clear motion difference between 144 and 180.
There isn't as much a frame rate limit but a resolution/framerate/animationspeed relationship. The fastest framerate you can perceive on a monitor is whatever is needed so there's only one pixel difference from one frame to the next, unless the resolution of the monitor is higher than what your eye can resolve.
Yall need to pay attention to the refresh rate of your LED lightbulbs in your ceilings. Some of those flicker between 60hz and 120hz. That's like the IRL FPS of your entire room at that point, no joke.
I discovered that the lightbulbs in my house had been causing migraines. It really is a big issue, I used my phone's slow motion video feature to check how bad the flickering was.
@Raytracer_Owlthat's how I found out, but with the A string of my strat guitar when I saw it wobble like crazy. Turned out it was the stroboscopic effect on the string vibration syncing with the flicker rate of my ceiling lamp. The super slow motion test on the phone also confirmed it. I'll try with a pencil next!
As can I, it's really not that hard. I've worked with DIY Christmas lights displays running at 100 Hz PWM and it's pretty obvious when you're looking for it
The key to flicker free LED lighting is increasing the duty cycle - % of time the LEDs shine. An LED connected to a battery (DC) doesn't flicker, but plugged into the wall (AC) electronics in the lamp switch rapidly to keep the LEDs from burning out. Flicker-free lamps have converter electronics that smooth out the harshness of on vs off (say, off = 85% of on brightness), which makes a bigger difference than frequency.
I can also see 120Hz LED flicker on the edge of my eye. Edges have lower resolution, but higher refresh rate (need to see predators flanking you). It is really subtle. Can confirm it with my phone’s 240Hz slo-mo camera. But if I drink one beer, I can’t see 120Hz LED flicker anymore. Most of the new LED lights don’t flicker anymore at low frequencies. Even the 240Hz slo-mo camera can’t see the flicker on new LEDs. But 3 years ago there was still a lot of flickering LEDs around.
Recently, I've started to notice that games look choppy when the frame rate drops below 60 hz. And even at 60 hz things like moving text appear choppy. When I was younger, I did not notice, and it did not bother me >:(
fps is how fast the application updates the scene and reads inputs. so it's actually even worse than just having a low refresh rate monitor... at least it only looks choppy, but low fps makes your camera move choppy too.
Finally someone who actually makes a video on this and did proper research.. I can't stand all the people who seriously believe humans can't see past 60Hz
DON'T TRY THE FLICKER TEST DEMO! The flicker test demo almost just broke my LCD screen. The checker board pattern got red-ish gray and and after going to another window the pattern was ghosting over everything. I thought it was just my pc or something, but after restarting the start screen flickered really fast and the pattern remained for another few minutes. I can't imagine what would have happened if i ran it for longer. please don't try it if you don't have the money to potentially replace your monitor.
Frankly, I still don't believe that. My guess is that either they recorded their data wrong, they did their experiment incorrectly, or theyre defining Hz in a way that is unfamiliar to me and likely a lot of other people. LED lights have a frequency of a few hundred Hz to a few kHz. And while you can sometimes see the flicker on especially cheap or nearly dead lights, the fact that this study found someone who can perceive well over ten times that which the average person doesn't notice makes me think its junk data
@theodorekorehonenThis test was about "motion blur", not the flicker itself. Yes I agree just staring at it it wouldn't be noticeable. However that's not what was tested. Human perception is complicated. There is a lot of stuff going on before it even reaches our "conscious thoughts". I believe that there are individuals that far from the norm, we're not factory made. I my self have issues with light sources that aren't at least 1KHz everything else produces headaches under prolonged exposure. Weirdly enough VR is fine for some reason...
Bro is just autistic, give them some slack. I say this with high confidence because autistic people much more commonly perceive flickering lights and have other sensory processing troubles
At one point when 1080p was top teir standard....i played at 720 at 120 simply because the input lag was basically non existent....and the mouse movement was sssoooooo tight
11:00 I'm able to see the changes of my ARGB lightstrip at the 48kHz its running at, and even the 200hz flicker of the backlight my projector has. And unfortunately the very annoying 50hz grid flicker my ceiling lights have. I'd be surprised if the limit wasn't above 60kHz range.
Huh, max flicker any human detected is about 20 kHz, which is about the limit of hearing. And 40 kHz refresh is what you get by applying the Nyquist theorem (sample rate = 2 x max feature frequency) to that. Most digital audio is recorded at 44.1 kHz and has been for decades. Very interesting!
Higher FPS above ~60 doesn’t magically improve reaction speed, but it absolutely improves comfort while tracking targets. Smoother motion makes it easier to follow movement and stay precise over time. But the idea that a high-refresh monitor lets you see enemies faster is mostly a myth - that’s not really how perception works. The benefit is smoother tracking, not earlier detection.
The thing about reaction time is that you have to *add* the time for the monitor to put out a frame showing a thing on top of human reaction time, and even if there was zero delay in processing the image (there actually is some delay), it would still add between zero and one frames of delay, and one frame at 60FPS is like 5% of a normal person's reaction time. For top FPS players, that's probably more like 10%.
It's not just about ability to see higher refresh rates, when you're not interacting 24fps can look very smooth because of image persistence. What really makes high refresh rates better is the "feel", the latency for things to react on screen compared to your tactile inputs
Same. I haven't tested if I can "see" more than 60hz, but I (and a lot of other people) can absolutely feel the difference in framerates/refresh rate during gameplay
@Moviefreak893my experience has been going from 60hz to 120hz to 240hz to 500hz is that I can tell a difference as long as the jump is enough. I could tell virtually no difference between 120hz and 165hz outside of it maybe feeling a tiny bit more responsive. I think that it kind of needs to keep doubling for you to really notice a difference but each time the difference gets smaller and smaller.
Using a 90Hz android and 60Hz iphone And i also some good reaction time so when i use iphone i dont just feel i can literally see the still frames in the animations
As someone who has actually studied this in a lab, you did a pretty decent job covering it, but there is one thing that you are missing. Studies show that the human eye can see roughly 30hz/sec more specifically if I remember correctly it's something like 28 or 29 Hz. However, the human eye doesn't see at a constant rate. It actually is able to change the frame rate at which it sees. This is because it doesn't theoretically have a frame rate, it's infinite. The human eye has cones and rods that send a constant, nonstop signal to your brain telling it what they are picking up. Your brain is not capable of processing that much information though, so it does something called sampling. As far as I am aware we don't know exactly how the sampling works. The two theories is that it either compresses a bunch of information into bite sized packets or it takes a screenshot (a frame) from the information and ignores the rest. The most popular theory is the frame theory but everyone who studies this knows that it's probably more complicated than that. So under abnormal situations your brain is actually capable of increasing the number of frames that it sees at. It's been shown that it does this regularly throughout the day, but especially in high stress situations. If you're playing a video game and getting shot at then you're probably seeing at a much higher rate than if you are just walking around and exploring in a safe area. The frame rate you see is fluid, it's ever changing second to second this makes frame overlap a real issue. It's basically impossible for your monitor to match the frame rate of your eyes even if one or two frames are timed perfectly because of the fluidity of your eyes frame rate it's impossible for your monitors frames to show up at the same time that your brain decides to take a sample. So there is going to be instances that your brain takes a sample between frames, creating a flicker effect. This is the reason that 60Hz is the standard for TV screens. This reduces the number of between frames you get. However, to reduce that number to 0 it's been shown as you mentioned that you need around 600Hz. That does not mean that you can see at 600Hz though, it means that at 600Hz you do not see the between frames. However, it's still even more complicated than that. The fact of the matter is that the human eye does not have a theoretical maximum frame rate that it can see at so that 40,000 give or take is just a guess. The real number could be far higher than that. All of that said, the science points to a frame rate of 180 being the best for common use. That's because the higher your frame rate gets the less noticeable the flicker effect gets and the blur as well. Less noticeable does not mean unnoticeable though. So if you wanna buy a higher frame rate monitor then that's your own prerogative but it will have an exponentially increasing coast for an exponentially decreasing benefit. Personally I choose to stick to 180 for all of my monitors, but I'm not a big gamer and a little motion blur under certain circumstances doesn't bother me very much.
@CatFish21sm Mostly troll because I assume you made the typo. I'd interpret 30 hz/sec as an increase of 30 hz per second. When I see s^-2 I think of acceleration.
i would make 120 fps vids if youtube could show them. BTW, shooting with continuous exposure (exposure time = 1/framerate) hides low framerates very well, i use it. It is also awesome for avoiding time aliasing when filming vibrating and rotating things (cones of speakers for example).
BFI just looks like shit. Especially on OLED. I've never seen why OLED has that function as well, but I feel like being at a club in the 90s with strobe light when watching.
You seem unaware that people are different. Just because cause you can see something doesn't mean everyone else can. This applies to literally everything, every single human (and individual of all other living beings) have different sensitivities to all parts of all their senses. All of this should be obvious to literally everyone.
Want to see 60hz flicker? If you're in the US and you have LED lighting set to 60hz standard, use your phones slo-mo, record, enjoy. You'll realize that your room looks like a disco club yet we can't see it ourselves.
@fietae Didn't say anyone denies it. Its just cool to see if you never knew it was a thing and most have no clue. People believe a lot of light around us is a continuous thing yet never know that its constantly flickering for the most part.
Here's the thing. The human eye is capable of more.But It is the brain that deciphers the information. So it's the brain and the optic nerve that is the limiting factor not the eye. And it's not that you can't see above or below a certain FPS. Its what your brain acknowledges.
There's a difference between what our eyes can see and the artificting we see from monitors. Wave your hand through the air and you will notice that it's insanely blurry. Forcing a monitor to show many copies of an image will mask ghosting but that's only because we pick up in between frames and there's a theoretical infinite number of points between movement on a screen. Therefore, in context of a monitor we would need a functionally infinite number of frames to truly mask this effect. While in the real world, where there IS an infinite number of frames, we genuinely ARE limited by the studies explained at the start of the video. It's not our eyes it's our perception. The monitors artifacting has absolutely nothing to do with what we can see but actually what artifacting we can notice. Hope this helps, because the question itself is simply wrong and there are two answers.
Tl;Dr the human eye CANNOT see thousands of frames a second. We cannot comprehend this. We CAN notice artifacting from monitors though at nearly any speed.
Because when your screen is 60hz it updates every 16.6ms. But if the game runs at 60fps the frame you see might start rendering at 2ms and finish at 6ms, so that the frame is 14ms old when it gets displayed on the screen. However when the game runs at higher fps several frames are rendered in the 16.6ms time frame but only the newest gets displayed, which might be only a few ms old making it less laggy
A rather smart kid would always tout how eyes only see 30fps and I always thought, "he's insane... How else do I tell the difference between 60 and 75hz let alone 60 and 120" His brains were obviously best at maths hm
A truly smart person would understand that all our eyes are different. My husband literally can't tell the difference above 30 and I cannot above 60. As a lifelong gamer since 30hz was the *target* even for dedicated PC gamers, I have ended up with a 144hz because despite not perceiving any difference I was constantly told i was misunderstanding or hadn't tried enough to see or that I was being stupid. But I cannot perceive any difference in smoothness between it and the 60hz next to it even when playing multiple instances of the same games side by side. I understand that other people can, but you're not smart enough to understand that not everyone can - so you've missed a developmental milestone you are supposed to hit before high school.
@Eunostos just in case you haven't done so, did you actually set the refreshrate of the monitor to 144Hz? Windows sometimes doesn't do this automatically
@Eunostos but you can absolutely tell the difference in simply moving your mouse around on the desktop. As long as you actually are running a higher refresh rate on your monitor, its just a matter of looking at how far the images of the mouse are when you move it around
@guesswho2778 sometimes? You mean never? Windows loves being all "eco-friendly" with its defaults. What the hell do the OS designers/devs/managers think I bought a 165hz monitor for? To use it at 60hz?
I think a good way to explain this is this, your eye sees 60fps so 60 different checks or whatever per second. If you have a 60hz screen it would need to be refreshing at the same time your eyes are taking in that information in to show perfect fluidity. Raising up to 120hz doubles the chance of those frames on screen lining up with your eyes. The higher you go the better. Scientifically not accurate but a half decent explanation
Exactly!! Photographic motion blur is a function of the shutter speed of a camera (vs the frame rate of the recording). At a high enough shutter speed, you won't really see any motion blur
@FordFourD-aka-Ford4Dit isnt photographic in nature tho....it is graphical. I do understand what you mean, but even with the fastest camera in the world it will still be distorted not due to the camera, but due to the game itself.
@Nam@NamenamenamenamenamenamenameM way "graphics" work is completely arbitrary. There is no technical requirement to display motion blur at all (hence why many TVs have a "smooth motion" feature which attempts to digitally remove it). 9 times out of 10 motion blur in a game is an _affectation_ - because engines for games and 3D simulations are designed from the ground up to mimic photographic principles for "realism" or a "filmic" quality. When rendering a series of images of a circle in a row to make it appear that a ball is bouncing, there's no "graphical" requirement to make any of those images smeared or have blur along a directional axis. That's added in to create a sense of change, motion, directionality, momentum.
MOVIES FPS IS HARD TO NOTICE BECAUSE OF INTENTIONAL CINEMATOGRAPHY CHOICES making your focus be diverted from the fps. BUT A VIDEOgames visuals are shown in real time, allowing for anything and everything to be happening, sso lower refresh rates are more noticable
I find the low fps of movies hard NOT to notice! And I freaking hate it! Choppy or blurry camera rides give me motion sickness and with 24 fps, a camera ride will always be choppy or blurry. I can't watch nature documentaries for that reason. They love to show those camera pans across the landscape from a helicopter, but at "cinematic" framerates, they're absolutely dizzying! 🤢
Video games have feedback, and the latency from input change to output change is very subconsciously noticeable. Even if you don't realise what it's coming from, you can feel something is different.
@LRM12o8 Slow pans are definitely harmed by 24fps. A lot of slow pans are significantly improved just by bumping the framerate to 30 - this is something Marques Brownlee has commented on, and why he does his videos in 30fps instead of 24fps.
What about g-sync pulsar monitors? Nvidia claims that with backlight strobing enabled they reach an effective 2000hz motion clarity. I wonder if they are talking only about motion blur or stroboscopic effect too
Great question! Pulsar addresses eye tracking motion blur only. Specifically it reduces it by a factor of 4, which is equivalent to quadrupling the refresh rate (so for 360Hz => 1440Hz). BUT, Stroboscopic stepping is not affected by it, unfortunately. So it only helps with one part of the problem. BTW, interestingly, stroboscopic steps don't look blurry. They appear as sharp afterimages trailing behind. (you can check this by shaking your mouse on the desktop)
Backlight strobing gets around the physical eyeballs persistence of vision. Because your eye moves smoothly to track motion, the frame that remains on screen smudges as you try to track a moving object. Black frame insertion or backlight strobing gets around this by giving you a black frame while you're tracking the motion. It just makes the frame you see clearer while tracking an object. It's the same thing that CRT televisions were praised for because they only show one line on screen at a time instead of the whole frame. The "effective" frame rate is marketing bs and nothing to do with actual measurable metrics.
@F3XT It didn't. Eye-tracking motion blur = looking a moving object (the object stays at the center of your retina), which makes the object look blurry due to the smearing. Backlight strobing addresses this. Stroboscopic steps = you look at a fixed point on the screen while an object is moving, you see the object move in steps. This can only be reduced by increasing the refresh rate. (Increased refresh rate also reduce eye-tracking motion blur, since each frame stays on the screen for shorter time.)
![SEMATARY - RAGING WOLF [OFFICIAL VIDEO]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/eFJJc8Eyhu4/mqdefault.jpg)
But human eye can see price tag past $1000
Nah man stop joking
haha so true, please keep joking about this man
tell that a 5090 user
Past 1$*
Im going to fight a pricetag
alright where's that 39620 hz monitor at
At ass
that part is much easier than finding the games and hardware that can run that without x400 fake frames with 1second delay
Don't know where it is but i can tell you for sure it will be cheaper than 32gb of ddr5 😂
it was tested using led bulbs, not monitors
@pragmaticparabellum3042Guess what's in displays
This is like when PS3 players used to claim PC players were wasting money for 60fps, because you can only see 24 lol
Do people still believe that the eye can’t see over 24fps?
@pauliewalnuts4451 Some will certainly still believe this in 20 years. Real information spread slowly in our current attention economy, everyone always distracted..
No one ever believed that
@r6scrubs126😂😂 you would be surprised
@r6scrubs126that is not true. I had many discussions with people about this or 60hz.
Those fast monitors hertz my wallet..
Clever!
@nengobtwonly clever at making stupid jokes
@das_sound_machine the joke isn’t that stupid
@nengobtwnot stupid you are😂😂🎉🎉🎉 congregations! 😂🎉🎉
@das_sound_machine Don't be mad at the fact that you can't make a more clever joke
I can't wait to game on my $10,000 8K 1440Hz monitor in the future
with 99% AI generated frames, sent to your computer from a data center halfway across the world
@Ion_Weapon Not if you have the premium deluxe addon subscription that guarantees you a datacenter in your region for just $300/mo
No Dp nor Hdmi cable can provide a such bandewith yet.
"in the future"
The industry pretty much dropped 8k entirely, though. Now it's 4k and high refresh rates.
42069 hz marketing gonna go crazy in 50 years
It’ll happen by 2093 I think
@omduggineni more like 2067
Thank god someone made an actually good video about this, people have been saying that you can't see above X frame rate for so long and it makes no sense.
that being said id rather take a high quality 60hz monitor over sub par samsung style gsync 240hz blurfest ones any day
@kristoffseisler2163 There are plenty great 240hz monitors now. Especially Oleds. They don't have blur at all.
@kristoffseisler2163 It's rough to find a blurfest 240hz monitor in 2026 though.
@kristoffseisler2163 I don't know man. It depends on what type of games you're playing. At 60hz is not only the lack of motion clarity that matters but the input lag as well.
Maybe for single player games. But anyone who plays competitive shooters is going to take the 240hz monitor no matter how bottom of the pack it ends up being.
People are generally pretty stupid. Generally.
The Human eye can't see past $600 though 😭😭🙏
my eye was able to see to $900, but now i have to cool it down with ice cube soup for the rest of the month.
i overclocked my eyes to see up to $700, but I sometimes need to take pause for them to cooldown.. I'm thinking of adding water cooling to them
300 because I am cheap
@annihil4nth i saw the price of a 5090 and my eyes activated built in water cooling (totally not crying at all)
@rakhoo5236 i like cheap and good performance 👍
Yea but my wallet cannot see anything above $300
Ok but 240Hz monitors are like $300 or less people have been making fun of even 144Hz monitors.
i went from a 60hz to 165hz monitor and i easily saw the difference. it was so great. now when i go back to 60hz, i can instantly tell and think its slow and "laggy"
Literally oced my monitor from 60 to 84hz that's already a big difference
I've played 360 and back to 60. You get used to 60 fast.
@Descending-melodies. yeah. doesn't change that higher hz is better.
@Descending-melodies.
Yeah at home I use mainly 144hz and at work I only use 60hz. I notice the difference, for work 60 is fine. Even for games 60 is fine if it's not super fast paced, as long as it's smooth. But for fast paced shooters I even hate playing at 120 if I normally get 144 lol.
I’ve been using 60Hz phone, 100Hz monitor at home, 144Hz monitor at work and 144Hz laptop and all of them feels fine and the same
alright whats the full spec sheet of the human eye.
Display Port V2 is needed to power the human eye, trust
Corridor crew has a video on this look it up. Super high resolution in our eyes too.
@RenFujiisan yeah though this organic fiber is so slimy and slippery that I dropped it a dozen times before successfully inserting it, and not only that, it took a couple months to install the firmware, but when it works you'll have one of the best screen in the market, 1/10 cuz it's hard to install, you'd think such an expensive thing would be plug and play,
Oh yeah don't buy ieye, it has planned obsolescence built in, some people have the lens becoming white after 5 years of use, though they are easier to install,
I also heard they're better eyes, with 4 cones instead of three, 100/20, binocular sensor fusion, but I don't have the money for it
Ironically there is a spec of the human eye, but it's far more complicated and also depend on the brain as well
Impossible to accurately demonstrate....
It's your entire trillions of synaptic responses which include the visual information we see, but how each of us process that information differently...
So....it's like trying to have enough pencil to calculate the entirety of all mass, energy ,etc. Just in our universe...the pencil's mass would exceed the total mass of the universe itself as the equation could be written on an infinite sized piece of paper
omg that checkerboard test is so trippy you keep your eyes still nothing you move then tiniest bit and bam the pattern just appears
Good ballpark. Thanks for using our data. I love to talk about the Four Elements (Four Thresholds), of approximate orders of magnitude.
[1of4] ... 10 - slideshows turns into motion;
[2of4] ... 100 - flicker ceases to be visible (Talbot Plateau Theorem)
[3of4] ... 1000 - (at GtG=0.0) motion blur ceases to be visible for small-FOV 1080p screens (smaller than a gaming monitor)
[4of4] ... 10000 - motion blur and stroboscopics cease to be visible for wide-FOV retina resolution screens.
I hope I am alive & we're still legally allowed to own our own computer hardware by the time monitor technology reaches, & evolves beyond, the 4th* threshold
(& also for it to be obtainable for less than 10% of the median household income of wherever I am living)
*edit: "last" -> "4th" - bc I accept that the 4th order of magnitude might just be 2100's 1080p 60fps*
When Blurbusters himself approve your video. You know you did good work!
Why is the PWM effect not discussed more, even in this video? Seems we downgraded our tech for marketing so they can sell you something new but the old tech was better? I want to get a PWM monitor and even if I want to I can't which is weird? We got rid of that so we can justify paying even more for GPUs? Because some people cried it's bad for your eyes when I never once noticed or had eye fatigue from it but now I suffer because somebody else found it uncomfortable.
@Eskimo-x5b for me i can see the pwm effect easily on many oled displays and lcds too (if they have pwm that is, its mostly oleds + cheaper lcds that use pwm backlighting), but it doesnt hurt my eyes, then again 60 hz on a crt doesnt really hurt my eyes either (which is what im looking at right now), though its a bit flickery, its alright when you pretend it doesnt exist and you just watch videos and stuff
@Eskimo-x5b Just curious, why would you want PWM? And how do you “suffer” with modern displays? 🤔
This is the video that we've needed for years. Someone who actually interprets the science correctly instead of seeing a number without reading anything else and going around for years telling people that number with zero context. This is the first video I have ever used the hype feature on, and I hope more people do the same.
He didn't just interpret the science. He DID the science. Science is experimenting and learning from the real world, and we need more of that. He did flicker tests on his own monitor, that's more than any of us.
@thewhitefalcon8539AND he made the tests available for free
@PJM257
Hype?
-That's a think on RUclips? 😅-
Fluorescent lights flicker to me.
50~60Hz depending on region usually
Im from California
Yeah, I live in a region of the world with 50 Hz power, and sometimes (especially when I'm tired), I can see lights flicker in a room
ive seen a guy who keeps telling using 120hz or above will destroy your eyes because human eyes can only see 60hz lol
Bruh. What is that logic
and the real world, which operates in real time, won't? 😭
Sounds like coping for not being able to afford higher refresh rate monitors.
Even if that was true, it makes absolutely no sense.
Nah but it destroys your wallet
PSA : if you didn't manually set your refresh rate in windows you're probably running at 60hz
My experience with that, is modern Windows will automatically use a higher frequency if available. I did have Nvidia set my screen back to 60Hz after enabling Gsync.
even Linux selects the highest (preferred) refresh rate automatically, why would windows make you select manually?
microslop can probably vibecode an automatic check for monitor refresh rate.
...looks like windows needs a whole "copilot + pc" LLM 🤮, spyware and telemetry, and even then it can't automatically detect the refresh rate.
@callyral because windows is dumb. I can confirm that I had to set it manually
@PeterParker-cb7tr This is partially correct modern builds of windows will default to higher refresh rates on some displays but you don't always get the maximum available and it varies a lot monitor to monitor due to differences in their edid data amongst other factors. (The good news is newer displays tend to have the right flags set so this issue should resolve itself over time)
@callyralWhat do you mean even Linux. It's better than Windows.
Yeah I knew those people were full of it! My monitor sometimes drops from 144 to 60 with windows updates and I can tell instantly when it happens. “bUt ThE hUMaN eYe CaNt SeE mOrE tHaN 60 Hz HeRp DeRp”
I shall use this as a way to continue my long-winded argument with my friend. It's been going on for years.
Does your friend think that the perceived difference is placebo or something because I can immediately tell the difference between 120hz vs 175hz let alone 60 to 120 its not even a smoothness thing for me its the input lag difference it makes with the mouse
@jamiealeksic8428 not only the input lag. You can have very low input lag with 120 Hz, but 240 Hz can be much smoother on quick response panels such as OLED.
120hz -> 240hz is also easily reckognizable on TN panels
Same bro... Maybe this will finally put the argument to rest 😭
@cashews1000 yes, but some TN panels still have high response rate, so it depends on the panel. OLEDs on the other hand almost never have stretched response time
9:08 monitor stand lowkey looking like a ps5
Yes my first thought I always saw a Ps5 XD
Me to
8:38 cycles, CYCLES!!!??!?! HOLY GD REFERENCE
It's more than just seeing it, it's feeling it when you move an input device.
Yeah it's satisfying. If only there was a CRT with 500hz or something. Those have amazing latency and bro it's so satisfying.
@REL10000I'm pretty happy with my 240hz oled
@REL10000 OLED has a pretty low latency. It's like 0.3ms, and probably even better with latest OLEDs.
@TyrianHaze I always have latency issues even while using a cord on dolphin emulator. I actually got really good latency while doing twilight princess on my phone with dolphin emulator. But latency is just normal for emulators.
@REL10000 Well, that's a problem external to the display technology being employed. The emulator is baseline latency, and the display technology is latency on top of that. There's latency throughout the entire chain of display, inputs, and processing, but ultimately you can tweak the variables to lower latency with a better display, inputs, and possibly faster PC to emulate faster.
I remember once seeing discussions about flickering due to people that have visual problems, some people can't really use phones because they can see the flickering and their eyes hurt even though most people can't really notice it, that's one of the big reasons why there's market for e-ink screens without backlights so you can have screens with 0 flickering
That's mostly an OLED problem. When the brightness of an OLED pixel gets low it starts to color shift. To stop this manufactures flicker the pixel to make it appear dimmer. Problem was they chose 240hz which as this video shows is too low for many people. Most have bumped it to at least 480hz though some are over 2000.
@draco10111b Sample and hold. It's not really about the flicker at all, it's that the motion will never be correct in a sample and hold display and the lower the frame rate, the more that's apparent. This is why a 60hz CRT monitor is perfectly smooth with it's scanning raster whilst 240hz Oled looks noticeably more choppy
@FX3T in a way it’s even worse - I can’t actually perceive the flickering directly right away, but without fail I get major eyestrain and a headache within 10-20 minutes of using an OLED phone with low PWM dimming frequency (most phones have 240Hz or even worse, used to be 120Hz on/off cycles to control brightness). As you can imagine, this makes most modern phones unusable!
This is a real problem for science in general. Humans are common enough to make the law of big numbers relevant. If everything is a bell curve, then that person who can see a 500Hz flicker exists. I am also someone who can perceive a flicker into the 150+Hz range...in the form of a headache.
And sometimes it's just certain frequencies are unpleasant to see
The german "Bis zum nächsten Video" caught me off guard
when does the next Audio lag vid drop😔
With Asio getting open sourced
@Kynatosh had to Google it. Seems like a quite easy solution.
@Kynatosh well JACK is an option too
though no game explicitly advertises usage of either JACK or ASIO (except for games like osu!), SDL and OpenAL allow JACK backends
ngl i wonder how much audio latency Pipewire has.
Maybe it already did and there's just a bit of a delay before you can hear it
3:31 We got DLSS birds before GTA VI.
All i can think was that bird would dominate in all FPS games.
@theuncanspan tge buddy was bed gord
😂😂😂😂😂😂
9:29 yeah because the camera captures stuff at lower framerate its also why you can sometimes see a video of a flying helicopter with a propeller that looks still or if you look at accelerated car's wheels you can see that the wheel rotation accelerates at first then slows down but the car actually was only speeding up in that time period. also strobing lights make it look like everything is happening slower than usual
BE AWARE: The flicker test can cause a similar effect to burn in on LCDs. To remove said effect, turn the monitor off, or display a full white image for about 5 minutes. This should almost completely resolve the issue, the rest will be gone with time.
THANK YOU M8!
I had a fkn heart attack from doing this for like 30ish seconds and having the chekerboard screen on all dark tones.
LCDs normally alternate electrical polarity of every pixel every frame so it averages out to 0. This avoids some burn-in effects that are caused by an electrical charge imbalance that doesn't average out to 0. This works for a normal image because it's +white one frame, -white the next frame, or it's +black the next frame, -black the next frame. But when you do the flicker test, you're alternating black and white frames at the same time the LCD is alternating polarity, so it's +white, -black, +white, -black, and that doesn't average out to 0 and doesn't cancel out the burn-in effect. (which is what it was trying to avoid by alternating). If it did +white, +black, -white, -black it would average out, but that's not what they do, they alternate every single frame. You wouldn't notice if you were doing a single-color flicker test, because the whole screen would just be a little brighter or darker than before, but when it's a checkerboard it's noticeable. Fortunately, it's temporary.
Another fun fact: due to imperfect electronics, the + and - aren't precisely balanced, so the LCD alternates polarity every line or pixel as well, so a + pixel is next to a - pixel and you see the average. There are test patterns online that alternate black pixels next to white pixels, so +black, -white, +black and on the next frame -black, +white, -black, and then they don't have +white next to -white and you can see a flicker. This test doesn't cause burn-in because each separate pixel is still balanced, you just see a visual flicker even though the picture isn't changing.
just got this shit💀
This is especially seen in IPS panels. The older ones from Panasonic were pretty immune, but LG, AUO and Chinese made panels can exhibit this "image sticking" or "retention" pretty bad. 5 minutes of full white may not be enough, but it will disappear in the end.
@thewhitefalcon8539 this is really helpful. I just wrote that Panasonic panels don't seem as prone to this as some others. Maybe they use a different driving algorithm.
we got actual human eye framerate analysis before GTA VI
Finally now I can send this video to people that rage bait me with their 60Hz monitor
A lot of people saw a catchy title of "The human eyes cant see past 60hz" without any further context or details. Thats their bottom line.
Most haven't even seen that, they just HEARD about it from someone
Lot of people claim 24hz max..
@fornax985 i remember when the limit was 30hz lol (argument used by console peasants 10-15 years ago)
one of my irl friend used that argument years ago before switching to pc and changing his entire view
And some forgot to change their display settings that defaults to 60Hz
that's just the nature of memes lol
4:15 oddly coincidential... Anton Petrov also brought this analogy for something different in one of his videos recently.
I have to wonder whether it's a coincidence that this aligns pretty closely with our audio bandwidth. Is 20kHz a neural architecture limit, while the 20-something Hz used for film (suspiciously similar to the lower edge of what we perceive as pitch) is our typical scene assembly rate, a computational constraint?
The stroboscopic effect is spatial rather than temporal, though. If you imagine a blinking pixel “moving” sideways across your field of view, for _any_ frequency of flicker there is a corresponding rate of travel that results in alternate pixels being illuminated, which would then become visible as a dotted line if the pixels were bright enough. You need to add computed blur (a spatiotemporal LPF…) to eliminate this sampling effect.
Anyway, as someone who has gone their whole life being driven buggy by blinking lights and choppy animations that are supposedly “easily good enough” I thank you for publishing this explainer.
20kHz is a frequency unit not a temporal resolution which is unknown as far as I'm aware
@SixToughI was trying to be clear by using Hz for a cycle time constraint, as opposed to phase resolution. I am not a neurologist, and I don't know the unit conventions of that field, but I don't think I've screwed up my dimensional analysis.
@stephenspackman5573 I am just saying you can not physically pulse and stop speaker within 1/20k seconds
@SixTough Oh, sorry, I misread and/or misunderstood you. But audio equipment is usually specced for a band of 20Hz-20kHz, which is a little optimistic for adults. Proper speakers can certainly oscillate at that frequency, which is why they have tweeters, and why consumer audio is typically recorded at a sample rate of 44.1 or 48kHz (Nyquist's theorem accounting for the extra factor of 2). It could all be a coincidence, but it struck me as interesting to see a similar range.
@stephenspackman5573 yeah I like your point, I'm just saying the 20kHz is in oscillation not in a discrete event, it's not often brought up, maybe you will find it interesting
I genuinely wonder if one of the reasons why so many people seem to think that you can't see past 60hz is solely because Windows always defaults to 60hz even when your monitor is capable of higher and they just never thought/knew to change their monitor settings.
I've seen people on forums and in monitor reviews complaining that they didn't see any difference after upgrading from a 60hz monitor only to later realise that they never increased their refresh rate from 60hz in their display settings.
Doesn't help that Windows for some reason puts the refresh rate in the advance tab instead of with the resolution.
It's even stranger when you consider on CRT's refresh rate and resolution are tied to one another. Why did they do it that way?
Thank you for reminding me to check that I was running at 120hz. I was, indeed, running at 60hz after my most recent reinstall.
I've tested 120 Hz on my phone, enabled it, saw no difference. Then disabled ofc
@Tdvtdvtdv Mustn't have been a very good test then 🤣
@CyberiadPhoenix continue deceiving yourself I guess...
Crt monitor be like 💪📺
2:58 Thank you for your editing! This did the same thing as a slow zoom (forces your eye to refocus, usually on the center), but without the issues of a slow zoom. I have trouble with the slow zooms in. I can handle rapid changes, but a slow zoom can give me a migrane. Go figure.
holy underrated channel, documentary level quality and research. by far one of the best tech ytbers rn
The anti-clickbait title is so refreshing it made your video stood out so much more than the crowd of clickbait titles on the home screen
real
I avoid click bait channels like the plague
funnily, where I'm from, that's how you would write 39 Hz (with 3 decimal places), and not 39 THOUSAND Hz. To me it felt super click baity, because I was convinced it was not true xD
@ruolbusame we write 39 620,00 with a space and comma is for decimals
@ruolbu Same thing here, but I didn't even realize, maybe I spent a tad too much time on the internet.
Every time you say "Hurts" there is a sinus to die. It is Hertz.
Movie producers just about do 23.997 fps
gamers always knew
-gamer
It's crazy how much propaganda was happening back then with people saying people can't see more than 60hz. This is why I dont trust shit on the internet
Really appreciate a video finally treating this seriously and with nuance.
15:40 I'm glad to see mention of the phantom array effect (where you move your line of sight and a trail of strobing patterns are left behind by LEDs, commonly seen in car brake lights, LED projectors, and so on)
It's one of those things where sure, you might not be able to 'see' a 500Hz flicker by staring straight at it, but then as soon as you look elsewhere, or look past it, or it moves relevant to your frame of vision, the flicker becomes very noticeable.
Can’t wait to verify aeternus with a 39,620 hz monitor
What ia blud talkn about 😭✌🏻
@cenkkinqzzzz3002this is a geometry dash player. Aeternus is a top 0 level. Verifying in the community means being the first person to beat a level. It is a level with a lot of 60 fps frame perfects.
@TheVindictiveLurker Damn this is a throwback also I just looked this up and Idk what kind of drugs Geometry Dash players are taking I remember playing the game a long time ago when it was blowing up but this is insane levels of joblessness lmao how is this even possible
Also interesting to note that the eye is made of different regions, the center of the eye having clearer vision than what we see from the outer areas (what we'd consider peripheral vision). Plus, there are limits to our vision which is actually due to our brain's processing, not the eye itself.
This was my thought process exactly, just cause the eye can "see" something doesn't mean the brain can register it.
@zufieusagi7509 is that fps vs hz
That's also why VR uses foveated rendering, Only renders what you look at directly in full resolution. I wonder if anyone ever did this for normal games. Just point a camera at your face and it would work, and could potentially save lots of processing to be put into more real FPS.
A well trained eye can see up to 69,420 Hz
Wow, this video is really good. Finally something easy to link to people when I end up in a discussion around display motion, so thank you!
1:11 Mr Krabs: MONEY!
The only use for that study is for those who haven't move on from their 60hz monitor and then use that as an excuse to justify what they feel, "human eyes can only see 60hz, so there is no difference to go beyond that, I'm not paying more to get the same" said someone who never feel the smoothness of 144hz
You put a lot of work into this video and it shows. Great job!
Thank you
Finally someone made a proper video on the topic
I tried the test, I did NOT expect for the headache that came. Holy shit my brain is still swirling 2 minutes later.
Dude wtf I used the webapp you linked and now the checkerboard pattern persists on my screen even after I've restarted my computer, my screen was even flickering while starting up, it's been a couple of minutes now and I can still see the pattern
The pattern slowly faded away after 10 minutes, I was using an AW2723DF at 240 Hz
Ah yeah, that's temporay image retention. Some monitors get this from these test patterns. The testufo sync track does that too on some monitors. Goes away after a couple of minutes, but you can also speed things up by running this full screen: www.shadertoy.com/view/tdXXRM
@techlessYTthanks for the tips, in my case the problem got resolved on its own but I'm glad there's a tool for this
@techlessYT You might want to pin that or put it somewhere more visible so people don't think you bricked their monitors or caused lasting damage
@jamiealeksic8428agreee
Bis zum nächsten Video und noch viel viel weiter!
Its been known for decades that the human eye can see faster than 60hz. Military testing showed pilots could identify specific plane models from images that were flashed for less than 1/600 of a second.
As of today (February 2026). This is now the single best video on motion portrayal available on RUclips.
I can confirm everything is correct as a huge motion portrayal nerd.
It’s easy to tell if a monitor is 60, 144 or 240hz just by quickly moving the mouse around and looking at the spacing
Well yeah but past 120Hz there is zero difference to my eyes. Some people say that they can see the difference between 120hz and 144hz but that's just bullshit.
@JesseOrSomething Maybe not 120 to 144, but absolutely if it jumps to 180 or 240
@JesseOrSomething Did you watch the video? The difference in the strobe effect is massive, for a while because of MOBO bios issue my 180hz was capped at 144hz, and my god, there's a clear motion difference between 144 and 180.
@astra_luminara I have poor eyesight and just can't notice it
This question bothered me for YEARS. I am now convinced. What a fantastic video ❤
i think messing around with the flicker demo rebooted my brain
sameee it was a weird feeling
Youve answered a question I have had invertly on why I see more motion blur on ranked! Thank you so much!
There isn't as much a frame rate limit but a resolution/framerate/animationspeed relationship. The fastest framerate you can perceive on a monitor is whatever is needed so there's only one pixel difference from one frame to the next, unless the resolution of the monitor is higher than what your eye can resolve.
Yall need to pay attention to the refresh rate of your LED lightbulbs in your ceilings. Some of those flicker between 60hz and 120hz. That's like the IRL FPS of your entire room at that point, no joke.
I discovered that the lightbulbs in my house had been causing migraines. It really is a big issue, I used my phone's slow motion video feature to check how bad the flickering was.
@ZabivakaPirate69you can also use the "pro" settings in your camera app to adjust the shutter speed until you see flicker (if there is any).
The easiest way to test this is to grab a pen or pencil and rapidly move it. If your lights are bad, you will see the stroboscopic effect
@Raytracer_Owlthat's how I found out, but with the A string of my strat guitar when I saw it wobble like crazy. Turned out it was the stroboscopic effect on the string vibration syncing with the flicker rate of my ceiling lamp. The super slow motion test on the phone also confirmed it. I'll try with a pencil next!
@Raytracer_Owl i do it with my fingers
2:40 I can notice leds flickering when they are above 100 hz
Whatttt that’s crazy
As can I, it's really not that hard. I've worked with DIY Christmas lights displays running at 100 Hz PWM and it's pretty obvious when you're looking for it
The key to flicker free LED lighting is increasing the duty cycle - % of time the LEDs shine. An LED connected to a battery (DC) doesn't flicker, but plugged into the wall (AC) electronics in the lamp switch rapidly to keep the LEDs from burning out. Flicker-free lamps have converter electronics that smooth out the harshness of on vs off (say, off = 85% of on brightness), which makes a bigger difference than frequency.
I can also see 120Hz LED flicker on the edge of my eye. Edges have lower resolution, but higher refresh rate (need to see predators flanking you). It is really subtle. Can confirm it with my phone’s 240Hz slo-mo camera. But if I drink one beer, I can’t see 120Hz LED flicker anymore. Most of the new LED lights don’t flicker anymore at low frequencies. Even the 240Hz slo-mo camera can’t see the flicker on new LEDs. But 3 years ago there was still a lot of flickering LEDs around.
That "bis zum nächsten Video" came as unexpected as my birth was to my parents 💀
Recently, I've started to notice that games look choppy when the frame rate drops below 60 hz. And even at 60 hz things like moving text appear choppy. When I was younger, I did not notice, and it did not bother me >:(
fps is how fast the application updates the scene and reads inputs. so it's actually even worse than just having a low refresh rate monitor... at least it only looks choppy, but low fps makes your camera move choppy too.
underrated youtuber
Finally someone who actually makes a video on this and did proper research.. I can't stand all the people who seriously believe humans can't see past 60Hz
DON'T TRY THE FLICKER TEST DEMO!
The flicker test demo almost just broke my LCD screen. The checker board pattern got red-ish gray and and after going to another window the pattern was ghosting over everything. I thought it was just my pc or something, but after restarting the start screen flickered really fast and the pattern remained for another few minutes. I can't imagine what would have happened if i ran it for longer. please don't try it if you don't have the money to potentially replace your monitor.
That poor sucker who tested for 19KHz had to be the test probably 20 times in a row before they believed the results...
Frankly, I still don't believe that. My guess is that either they recorded their data wrong, they did their experiment incorrectly, or theyre defining Hz in a way that is unfamiliar to me and likely a lot of other people.
LED lights have a frequency of a few hundred Hz to a few kHz. And while you can sometimes see the flicker on especially cheap or nearly dead lights, the fact that this study found someone who can perceive well over ten times that which the average person doesn't notice makes me think its junk data
@theodorekorehonenThis test was about "motion blur", not the flicker itself.
Yes I agree just staring at it it wouldn't be noticeable.
However that's not what was tested.
Human perception is complicated.
There is a lot of stuff going on before it even reaches our "conscious thoughts".
I believe that there are individuals that far from the norm, we're not factory made.
I my self have issues with light sources that aren't at least 1KHz everything else produces headaches under prolonged exposure.
Weirdly enough VR is fine for some reason...
@theodorekorehonen Look up "Phanton Array Effect kHz" it's a real thing and mind blowing, too 😅
Bro is just autistic, give them some slack. I say this with high confidence because autistic people much more commonly perceive flickering lights and have other sensory processing troubles
Ive been waiting for this so long. The 60hz argument has always annoyed me. Thank you.
2:02 can absolutely see 60vs120. I have a note 20 ultra. I run it at lower resolution just to get 120Hz.it's a world of difference.
FRRRR (except with 144hz for me)
I feel that around 90 fps is the threshold where it doesn't feel much smoother if you go higher. So yes 60 vs 120 is a massive difference
At one point when 1080p was top teir standard....i played at 720 at 120 simply because the input lag was basically non existent....and the mouse movement was sssoooooo tight
@mladenmales3984- Ya, I run my Moto Edge at 144hz at 60hz text scrolling looks really choppy. 120hz is better, but you still notice the chop a bit.
@nimmen My main monitor is 180Hz and my second monitor is 120Hz, I absolutely can tell the difference even by just moving my mouse around
11:00 I'm able to see the changes of my ARGB lightstrip at the 48kHz its running at, and even the 200hz flicker of the backlight my projector has. And unfortunately the very annoying 50hz grid flicker my ceiling lights have. I'd be surprised if the limit wasn't above 60kHz range.
wait so thats why it feels easier to see flickers compared to some people?
that shame moment when light travel faster than sound but on information context is the opposite
Man, you've outdone yourself with this video.
I agree. I've seen many videos about this topic over the years but never so in depth and it's still pretty easy to follow. Props
If only it weren't for the old-fashioned and annoying axial cuts in the video stream. Apart from that, I agree. Great analysis.
Huh, max flicker any human detected is about 20 kHz, which is about the limit of hearing. And 40 kHz refresh is what you get by applying the Nyquist theorem (sample rate = 2 x max feature frequency) to that. Most digital audio is recorded at 44.1 kHz and has been for decades.
Very interesting!
Interesting. So the brain’s frequency? The only difference being that we watch movies at 24 fps but we couldn’t hear 24 Hz.
False equivalence imho.
some lights i can see the flicker in the corner of my eye not when i look directly
Dude, your test put a line in the middle of my screen.
Rip now im not trying 😂
I got a vignette and rectangle watermark for several minutes. I thought my browser bugged out but it's actually on the monitor screen. Testers beware.
@jayojyoti_roygot nothing, everything works fine, i tested it multiple times and let it run for an extended period (ipad pro m5 with dual oled screen)
My screen won’t stop flicking now
@Jellyfishiess damn u guys fkd ur sht up
Higher FPS above ~60 doesn’t magically improve reaction speed, but it absolutely improves comfort while tracking targets. Smoother motion makes it easier to follow movement and stay precise over time. But the idea that a high-refresh monitor lets you see enemies faster is mostly a myth - that’s not really how perception works. The benefit is smoother tracking, not earlier detection.
The thing about reaction time is that you have to *add* the time for the monitor to put out a frame showing a thing on top of human reaction time, and even if there was zero delay in processing the image (there actually is some delay), it would still add between zero and one frames of delay, and one frame at 60FPS is like 5% of a normal person's reaction time. For top FPS players, that's probably more like 10%.
It's not just about ability to see higher refresh rates, when you're not interacting 24fps can look very smooth because of image persistence. What really makes high refresh rates better is the "feel", the latency for things to react on screen compared to your tactile inputs
I can feel a difference between 75hz and 180 hz 1:51
Same. I haven't tested if I can "see" more than 60hz, but I (and a lot of other people) can absolutely feel the difference in framerates/refresh rate during gameplay
@Moviefreak893my experience has been going from 60hz to 120hz to 240hz to 500hz is that I can tell a difference as long as the jump is enough. I could tell virtually no difference between 120hz and 165hz outside of it maybe feeling a tiny bit more responsive. I think that it kind of needs to keep doubling for you to really notice a difference but each time the difference gets smaller and smaller.
Hz, not hz.
Using a 90Hz android and 60Hz iphone
And i also some good reaction time so when i use iphone i dont just feel i can literally see the still frames in the animations
@tierinie using a 120 Hz android, keep it on 60 because I can't see any difference 😂
As someone who has actually studied this in a lab, you did a pretty decent job covering it, but there is one thing that you are missing.
Studies show that the human eye can see roughly 30hz/sec more specifically if I remember correctly it's something like 28 or 29 Hz. However, the human eye doesn't see at a constant rate. It actually is able to change the frame rate at which it sees. This is because it doesn't theoretically have a frame rate, it's infinite. The human eye has cones and rods that send a constant, nonstop signal to your brain telling it what they are picking up. Your brain is not capable of processing that much information though, so it does something called sampling. As far as I am aware we don't know exactly how the sampling works. The two theories is that it either compresses a bunch of information into bite sized packets or it takes a screenshot (a frame) from the information and ignores the rest. The most popular theory is the frame theory but everyone who studies this knows that it's probably more complicated than that.
So under abnormal situations your brain is actually capable of increasing the number of frames that it sees at. It's been shown that it does this regularly throughout the day, but especially in high stress situations. If you're playing a video game and getting shot at then you're probably seeing at a much higher rate than if you are just walking around and exploring in a safe area. The frame rate you see is fluid, it's ever changing second to second this makes frame overlap a real issue. It's basically impossible for your monitor to match the frame rate of your eyes even if one or two frames are timed perfectly because of the fluidity of your eyes frame rate it's impossible for your monitors frames to show up at the same time that your brain decides to take a sample. So there is going to be instances that your brain takes a sample between frames, creating a flicker effect.
This is the reason that 60Hz is the standard for TV screens. This reduces the number of between frames you get. However, to reduce that number to 0 it's been shown as you mentioned that you need around 600Hz.
That does not mean that you can see at 600Hz though, it means that at 600Hz you do not see the between frames. However, it's still even more complicated than that. The fact of the matter is that the human eye does not have a theoretical maximum frame rate that it can see at so that 40,000 give or take is just a guess. The real number could be far higher than that.
All of that said, the science points to a frame rate of 180 being the best for common use. That's because the higher your frame rate gets the less noticeable the flicker effect gets and the blur as well. Less noticeable does not mean unnoticeable though. So if you wanna buy a higher frame rate monitor then that's your own prerogative but it will have an exponentially increasing coast for an exponentially decreasing benefit.
Personally I choose to stick to 180 for all of my monitors, but I'm not a big gamer and a little motion blur under certain circumstances doesn't bother me very much.
What unit is hz/sec? An acceleratrion?
@PhaTs00p
I'm not sure if this is a serious question or you're just being a troll, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, it was a typo.
@CatFish21sm Mostly troll because I assume you made the typo. I'd interpret 30 hz/sec as an increase of 30 hz per second. When I see s^-2 I think of acceleration.
imagine monitor manufacturers making it only 39619 hz
I ran the flicker test, but it had NOT sopped. EVEN AFTER RESTARTING PC AND GRAPHICS DRIVER!!!
This video not being 60fps is criminal
i would make 120 fps vids if youtube could show them.
BTW, shooting with continuous exposure (exposure time = 1/framerate) hides low framerates very well, i use it. It is also awesome for avoiding time aliasing when filming vibrating and rotating things (cones of speakers for example).
@invendelirium There are 120fps videos on RUclips, since you can increase video speed to 2x (you can also do 4x but that's paywalled).
@Conorator 💀
@Conorator There are extensions and alternative apps which let you go beyond 2x without paying
@godminnette2 technically you could download the video and put it in an editing program and go to 1000x speed
The human eye has motion blur enabled
2:24 who are all these people that can't see flicker past 60hz?? I can't use black frame insertion on a 240hz TV because the flicker is so jarring!
BFI just looks like shit. Especially on OLED. I've never seen why OLED has that function as well, but I feel like being at a club in the 90s with strobe light when watching.
Less motion blur@nicolaihalby
@i-gor2never had it on OLED. Only problem with OLED is that due to the ultra fast response time, 24 fps can get cinema judder when panning.
Yeah, blackframe insertion is used for minimal motion blur. On OLED displays it isn't very useful@nicolaihalby
You seem unaware that people are different. Just because cause you can see something doesn't mean everyone else can. This applies to literally everything, every single human (and individual of all other living beings) have different sensitivities to all parts of all their senses.
All of this should be obvious to literally everyone.
Want to see 60hz flicker? If you're in the US and you have LED lighting set to 60hz standard, use your phones slo-mo, record, enjoy. You'll realize that your room looks like a disco club yet we can't see it ourselves.
I hate flickering led lights. If I move in any way they are like a painful eyesore
Doesn't happen on high quality LED lights
yeah but noone denies the existence of 60hz flicker so how does this help
@fietae Didn't say anyone denies it. Its just cool to see if you never knew it was a thing and most have no clue. People believe a lot of light around us is a continuous thing yet never know that its constantly flickering for the most part.
All but the very cheapest make light on both halves of the power line cycle, so they should make 120 Hz flicker.
Here's the thing. The human eye is capable of more.But It is the brain that deciphers the information. So it's the brain and the optic nerve that is the limiting factor not the eye. And it's not that you can't see above or below a certain FPS. Its what your brain acknowledges.
There's a difference between what our eyes can see and the artificting we see from monitors. Wave your hand through the air and you will notice that it's insanely blurry. Forcing a monitor to show many copies of an image will mask ghosting but that's only because we pick up in between frames and there's a theoretical infinite number of points between movement on a screen. Therefore, in context of a monitor we would need a functionally infinite number of frames to truly mask this effect. While in the real world, where there IS an infinite number of frames, we genuinely ARE limited by the studies explained at the start of the video. It's not our eyes it's our perception. The monitors artifacting has absolutely nothing to do with what we can see but actually what artifacting we can notice. Hope this helps, because the question itself is simply wrong and there are two answers.
Tl;Dr the human eye CANNOT see thousands of frames a second. We cannot comprehend this. We CAN notice artifacting from monitors though at nearly any speed.
@juigi34 Correct. But the latter is what's relevant. It's why ideally we want 5 digits refresh rates monitors.
But remember guys high fps but 60hrz is better than 60fps and 60hrz
Because when your screen is 60hz it updates every 16.6ms. But if the game runs at 60fps the frame you see might start rendering at 2ms and finish at 6ms, so that the frame is 14ms old when it gets displayed on the screen.
However when the game runs at higher fps several frames are rendered in the 16.6ms time frame but only the newest gets displayed, which might be only a few ms old making it less laggy
@DVDCJWtysm for explaining, also is there is a exact perfect number or just the higher the better
Anyone else's brain fill in "39,620" to be "69,420" or is it just me?
A rather smart kid would always tout how eyes only see 30fps and I always thought, "he's insane... How else do I tell the difference between 60 and 75hz let alone 60 and 120"
His brains were obviously best at maths hm
A truly smart person would understand that all our eyes are different. My husband literally can't tell the difference above 30 and I cannot above 60. As a lifelong gamer since 30hz was the *target* even for dedicated PC gamers, I have ended up with a 144hz because despite not perceiving any difference I was constantly told i was misunderstanding or hadn't tried enough to see or that I was being stupid. But I cannot perceive any difference in smoothness between it and the 60hz next to it even when playing multiple instances of the same games side by side.
I understand that other people can, but you're not smart enough to understand that not everyone can - so you've missed a developmental milestone you are supposed to hit before high school.
@Eunostosi find that highly unlikely. That is a very low bar and if true would mean something is very out of order either in your cognition or eyes.
@Eunostos just in case you haven't done so, did you actually set the refreshrate of the monitor to 144Hz?
Windows sometimes doesn't do this automatically
@Eunostos but you can absolutely tell the difference in simply moving your mouse around on the desktop. As long as you actually are running a higher refresh rate on your monitor, its just a matter of looking at how far the images of the mouse are when you move it around
@guesswho2778 sometimes? You mean never? Windows loves being all "eco-friendly" with its defaults.
What the hell do the OS designers/devs/managers think I bought a 165hz monitor for? To use it at 60hz?
I think a good way to explain this is this, your eye sees 60fps so 60 different checks or whatever per second. If you have a 60hz screen it would need to be refreshing at the same time your eyes are taking in that information in to show perfect fluidity. Raising up to 120hz doubles the chance of those frames on screen lining up with your eyes. The higher you go the better. Scientifically not accurate but a half decent explanation
13:30 whats the shutter speed?
While I can't answer for him. Blurbusters recommends about 4 refresh cycles long shutter. So probably that.
Good question! Engaging so he sees this
Exactly!! Photographic motion blur is a function of the shutter speed of a camera (vs the frame rate of the recording). At a high enough shutter speed, you won't really see any motion blur
@FordFourD-aka-Ford4Dit isnt photographic in nature tho....it is graphical.
I do understand what you mean, but even with the fastest camera in the world it will still be distorted not due to the camera, but due to the game itself.
@Nam@NamenamenamenamenamenamenameM way "graphics" work is completely arbitrary. There is no technical requirement to display motion blur at all (hence why many TVs have a "smooth motion" feature which attempts to digitally remove it). 9 times out of 10 motion blur in a game is an _affectation_ - because engines for games and 3D simulations are designed from the ground up to mimic photographic principles for "realism" or a "filmic" quality. When rendering a series of images of a circle in a row to make it appear that a ball is bouncing, there's no "graphical" requirement to make any of those images smeared or have blur along a directional axis. That's added in to create a sense of change, motion, directionality, momentum.
MOVIES FPS IS HARD TO NOTICE BECAUSE OF INTENTIONAL CINEMATOGRAPHY CHOICES making your focus be diverted from the fps. BUT A VIDEOgames visuals are shown in real time, allowing for anything and everything to be happening, sso lower refresh rates are more noticable
I find the low fps of movies hard NOT to notice! And I freaking hate it! Choppy or blurry camera rides give me motion sickness and with 24 fps, a camera ride will always be choppy or blurry. I can't watch nature documentaries for that reason. They love to show those camera pans across the landscape from a helicopter, but at "cinematic" framerates, they're absolutely dizzying! 🤢
Video games have feedback, and the latency from input change to output change is very subconsciously noticeable. Even if you don't realise what it's coming from, you can feel something is different.
@asdtyuv30fps games are fine if it's a stylistic choice. I don't like the hate
Video games also have frame time phasing issues and animation error, both worsening motion clarity.
@LRM12o8 Slow pans are definitely harmed by 24fps. A lot of slow pans are significantly improved just by bumping the framerate to 30 - this is something Marques Brownlee has commented on, and why he does his videos in 30fps instead of 24fps.
remember the guy who sliced a pistol shot bullet mid air with a ninja sword? (u can see it here on youtube any day)
Jokes on you, I play my games at 10 fps and still percieve it as motion
Well, mostly Minecraft but my point still stands
Actual intelligence frame gen
Bro got inbuilt 6x frame gen😭✌🏻
What about g-sync pulsar monitors? Nvidia claims that with backlight strobing enabled they reach an effective 2000hz motion clarity. I wonder if they are talking only about motion blur or stroboscopic effect too
Great question! Pulsar addresses eye tracking motion blur only. Specifically it reduces it by a factor of 4, which is equivalent to quadrupling the refresh rate (so for 360Hz => 1440Hz). BUT, Stroboscopic stepping is not affected by it, unfortunately. So it only helps with one part of the problem. BTW, interestingly, stroboscopic steps don't look blurry. They appear as sharp afterimages trailing behind. (you can check this by shaking your mouse on the desktop)
Backlight strobing gets around the physical eyeballs persistence of vision. Because your eye moves smoothly to track motion, the frame that remains on screen smudges as you try to track a moving object. Black frame insertion or backlight strobing gets around this by giving you a black frame while you're tracking the motion. It just makes the frame you see clearer while tracking an object. It's the same thing that CRT televisions were praised for because they only show one line on screen at a time instead of the whole frame. The "effective" frame rate is marketing bs and nothing to do with actual measurable metrics.
would want to know this too
@Will-wi3kv what the comment above you said is the complete opposite so which one of you two are actually right?
@F3XT It didn't.
Eye-tracking motion blur = looking a moving object (the object stays at the center of your retina), which makes the object look blurry due to the smearing. Backlight strobing addresses this.
Stroboscopic steps = you look at a fixed point on the screen while an object is moving, you see the object move in steps. This can only be reduced by increasing the refresh rate. (Increased refresh rate also reduce eye-tracking motion blur, since each frame stays on the screen for shorter time.)
The universe is frequencies