4 ms·

4. If they previously had a 60Hz monitor, and upgraded to 120Hz or better. This improves both motion quality and latency. When poorly designed software makes y

by mrob 6y ago

4. If they previously had a 60Hz monitor, and upgraded to 120Hz or better. This improves both motion quality and latency. When poorly designed software makes you wait multiple frames, halving (or better) the frame time makes a noticeable difference.

ComputerGuru 6y ago
I find this one hard to swallow. On 60Hz software is already the bottleneck even on high end hardware. If anything, it’ll drive a perfectionist mad because crappy software that the high end hardware allowed to operate just over that threshold (say 64Hz) would suddenly be exposed. I think jitter is more important than FPS and until software has caught up (likely never) I would rather cap the frame rate at 60 FPS and experience that somewhat consistently rather than have such disparate performances. It’s the same thing with retina/HiDPI. It’s amazing when everything is retina, but all the random bits and pieces of UI, let alone entire softwares, that appear blurry make for a worse experience than a strictly low dpi UX.
- ehvatum 6y ago
  120Hz is incredible for gaming. Unity and Unreal Engine dynamically scale tessellation and many other things to accommodate hardware performance, so as to maintain FPS on high-refresh screens. The polygon counts, texture detail, AI complexity of modern games is bonkers, but multiple moon landings of engineering time has gone into keeping solid 100Hz+ frame rates. However, you are definitely correct when it comes to GUI productivity applications. Drawing text in boxes is apparently much harder than rendering an immersive world in real time. The implications are too disturbing to consider, so I do not.
  - mrob 6y ago
    Some of it is deliberate: https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10543 https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10543 It's another harmful effect of mobile-first design. A trivial power saving gives measurably improved battery life, but the horrible latency is ignored.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    > 120Hz is incredible for gaming. ...if you're playing with v-sync :-P. I got a (rather expensive too) 165Hz monitor recently and the main benefit is to lessen the lag that Windows' forced composition (which also does v-sync) has. But in games i always played with v-sync turned off (i do not mind the tearing, unless it only happens at a fixed position i never really notice it) and the responsiveness was already very high. And on Linux and older versions of Windows where i could disable the compositor, i already had high responsiveness on the GUI too (if anything i feel like even with the 165Hz monitor, the Windows 10 desktop is still not as responsive as Windows 7 and previous versions of Windows were with the compositor disabled). Though a large issue with that is how modern monitors work. I also have a CRT connected to an older computer here which can do 120Hz and the motion feel is considerably better to the point where i wonder what the hell was wrong with people in the mid-2000s to switch away from CRTs when in pretty much every other area except size and weight, the CRTs were superior - especially at the time (better image quality, better and true dark colors, better responsiveness/no 'response time', higher refresh rates, higher resolutions, variable resolutions with no scaling artifacts, etc). In fact a reason i decided to try a 165Hz monitor was because i recently connected that CRT to a machine that can do 120Hz and have some games to run at 120fps and wanted that experience for my main PC too. (sadly i do have a feeling that if i hadn't used a CRT the last few years i'd be more enthusiastic about my new monitor since i do not think the currently technology can do much better - at least without going to something like that gigantic $3k OLED monitor though even that would annoy me for its size)
    - micv 6y ago
      The size and weight of CRTs was basically unbearable. Huge problems. You can give up a lot to get out from that, and most CRTs weren't that sort of high quality. Most of us lost nothing but a huge inconvenience when we moved from CRT to LCD/TFT/whatever.
      - badsectoracula 6y ago
        But it isn't like you'd get your CRT out for a walk or anything, you'd buy a monitor and leave it at your desk for months - often years - so that weight wasn't much of an issue unless you moved around all the time.
  - CarbyAu 6y ago
    Every now and again I think a "Windowing/Compositing" desktop experience replacement in the form of an Unreal Engine based "game" would be cool. Even supports VR. '80s Cyberpunk matrix here I come! pulls out a virtual gun to kill a process dead
    - influx 6y ago
      Have you seen psdoom?
      - CarbyAu 6y ago
        No I had not! It seems like what I was thinking. Take the same idea and put it into Unreal Engine. Add further OS interactions like files, maybe a floating virtual window for web browsing etc. The UX has to be done very well though otherwise you are a prediction by TV show Community: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FGzE4endQ&ab https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FGzE4endQ&ab
- danudey 6y ago
  > It’s the same thing with retina/HiDPI. It’s amazing when everything is retina, but all the random bits and pieces of UI, let alone entire softwares, that appear blurry make for a worse experience than a strictly low dpi UX. The very, very first thing I did at my last company after migrating to a retina Macbook Pro was go into our monitoring systems and configure it to render the graphs at 2x size and then scale them down on the client.
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago
    That used to be the default circa 2013 and the original rMBP. IIRC they only ~recently changed that, and I believe it was because the hardware had stagnated to the point where the GPU couldn’t keep up.
- Negitivefrags 6y ago
  No, he really is right. A lot of software, especially websites, have annoying waits for Vsync that are not needed in them. When you update styles that triggers a reflow or repaint, then you can introduce a wait for VSync in your website thats stalls flow until it is finished. If you add 3 frames of delay at 60fps then it's 50ms of delay, and only 25ms at 120fps. It doesn't sound like a lot, but that 25ms can be the difference between feeling totally fluid and not, and a lot of websites are even worse than that. Software can be IO bound, Network bound, CPU bound, memory bound. Modern software is Vsync bound!
vbezhenar 6y ago
Can't confirm that. Used 144 Hz display and was not really able to tell a difference. I run benchmark and there were very subtle difference, but 60 hz is more than enough for me. Now 4K resolution is a big deal.
- pcdoodle 6y ago
  You must be immune to the "soap opera effect" on the newer TVs as well.
  - fgonzag 6y ago
    I am not (it actually really really bothers me to the point of making TV unwatchable) and I can't for the life of me notice the difference between 120hz and 60hz between my work and home monitors.

by mrob 6y ago

ComputerGuru 6y ago

I find this one hard to swallow. On 60Hz software is already the bottleneck even on high end hardware. If anything, it’ll drive a perfectionist mad because crappy software that the high end hardware allowed to operate just over that threshold (say 64Hz) would suddenly be exposed. I think jitter is more important than FPS and until software has caught up (likely never) I would rather cap the frame rate at 60 FPS and experience that somewhat consistently rather than have such disparate performances. It’s the same thing with retina/HiDPI. It’s amazing when everything is retina, but all the random bits and pieces of UI, let alone entire softwares, that appear blurry make for a worse experience than a strictly low dpi UX.

ehvatum 6y ago
120Hz is incredible for gaming. Unity and Unreal Engine dynamically scale tessellation and many other things to accommodate hardware performance, so as to maintain FPS on high-refresh screens. The polygon counts, texture detail, AI complexity of modern games is bonkers, but multiple moon landings of engineering time has gone into keeping solid 100Hz+ frame rates. However, you are definitely correct when it comes to GUI productivity applications. Drawing text in boxes is apparently much harder than rendering an immersive world in real time. The implications are too disturbing to consider, so I do not.
- mrob 6y ago
  Some of it is deliberate: https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10543 https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10543 It's another harmful effect of mobile-first design. A trivial power saving gives measurably improved battery life, but the horrible latency is ignored.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  > 120Hz is incredible for gaming. ...if you're playing with v-sync :-P. I got a (rather expensive too) 165Hz monitor recently and the main benefit is to lessen the lag that Windows' forced composition (which also does v-sync) has. But in games i always played with v-sync turned off (i do not mind the tearing, unless it only happens at a fixed position i never really notice it) and the responsiveness was already very high. And on Linux and older versions of Windows where i could disable the compositor, i already had high responsiveness on the GUI too (if anything i feel like even with the 165Hz monitor, the Windows 10 desktop is still not as responsive as Windows 7 and previous versions of Windows were with the compositor disabled). Though a large issue with that is how modern monitors work. I also have a CRT connected to an older computer here which can do 120Hz and the motion feel is considerably better to the point where i wonder what the hell was wrong with people in the mid-2000s to switch away from CRTs when in pretty much every other area except size and weight, the CRTs were superior - especially at the time (better image quality, better and true dark colors, better responsiveness/no 'response time', higher refresh rates, higher resolutions, variable resolutions with no scaling artifacts, etc). In fact a reason i decided to try a 165Hz monitor was because i recently connected that CRT to a machine that can do 120Hz and have some games to run at 120fps and wanted that experience for my main PC too. (sadly i do have a feeling that if i hadn't used a CRT the last few years i'd be more enthusiastic about my new monitor since i do not think the currently technology can do much better - at least without going to something like that gigantic $3k OLED monitor though even that would annoy me for its size)
  - micv 6y ago
    The size and weight of CRTs was basically unbearable. Huge problems. You can give up a lot to get out from that, and most CRTs weren't that sort of high quality. Most of us lost nothing but a huge inconvenience when we moved from CRT to LCD/TFT/whatever.
    - badsectoracula 6y ago
      But it isn't like you'd get your CRT out for a walk or anything, you'd buy a monitor and leave it at your desk for months - often years - so that weight wasn't much of an issue unless you moved around all the time.
- CarbyAu 6y ago
  Every now and again I think a "Windowing/Compositing" desktop experience replacement in the form of an Unreal Engine based "game" would be cool. Even supports VR. '80s Cyberpunk matrix here I come! pulls out a virtual gun to kill a process dead
  - influx 6y ago
    Have you seen psdoom?
    - CarbyAu 6y ago
      No I had not! It seems like what I was thinking. Take the same idea and put it into Unreal Engine. Add further OS interactions like files, maybe a floating virtual window for web browsing etc. The UX has to be done very well though otherwise you are a prediction by TV show Community: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FGzE4endQ&ab https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FGzE4endQ&ab
danudey 6y ago
> It’s the same thing with retina/HiDPI. It’s amazing when everything is retina, but all the random bits and pieces of UI, let alone entire softwares, that appear blurry make for a worse experience than a strictly low dpi UX. The very, very first thing I did at my last company after migrating to a retina Macbook Pro was go into our monitoring systems and configure it to render the graphs at 2x size and then scale them down on the client.
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  That used to be the default circa 2013 and the original rMBP. IIRC they only ~recently changed that, and I believe it was because the hardware had stagnated to the point where the GPU couldn’t keep up.
Negitivefrags 6y ago
No, he really is right. A lot of software, especially websites, have annoying waits for Vsync that are not needed in them. When you update styles that triggers a reflow or repaint, then you can introduce a wait for VSync in your website thats stalls flow until it is finished. If you add 3 frames of delay at 60fps then it's 50ms of delay, and only 25ms at 120fps. It doesn't sound like a lot, but that 25ms can be the difference between feeling totally fluid and not, and a lot of websites are even worse than that. Software can be IO bound, Network bound, CPU bound, memory bound. Modern software is Vsync bound!

vbezhenar 6y ago

Can't confirm that. Used 144 Hz display and was not really able to tell a difference. I run benchmark and there were very subtle difference, but 60 hz is more than enough for me. Now 4K resolution is a big deal.

pcdoodle 6y ago
You must be immune to the "soap opera effect" on the newer TVs as well.
- fgonzag 6y ago
  I am not (it actually really really bothers me to the point of making TV unwatchable) and I can't for the life of me notice the difference between 120hz and 60hz between my work and home monitors.