Readit Newsptramo commented on Oncle Bob: static sites for everyone onclebob.com/... · Posted by u/ptramo
Still very early. Hoping to integrate site builders moving forward.
Nothing revolutionary, just a one-night project for a minimal solution to "how do I get a DNS record quick?"
People were skeptical that 120Hz vs 60Hz made any difference in gaming. I’m still not sure how skeptical I should be. The threshold seems somewhere between 60 and 240, and it’s really hard to believe that 240 makes a measurable difference in real world performance (e.g. competitive games). But I can believe 120Hz matters vs 60Hz.
There’s also confusion over human response time vs whether you can perceive something. Even if 240Hz looks slightly different, if a human can’t react to that difference (other than to say it looks nicer, which is a personal preference rather than an empirical assessment of “better”) then it doesn’t really matter anyway. Kind of like how Avatar looked different in 48Hz instead of 24Hz, and at the time it was hailed as some revolution in movies, and then it came and went. Personal preference.
As a direct answer to your question, I was a gamedev from 2005 to 2012, and back then people were arguing that 120Hz couldn’t make a difference and that 60Hz was fine. It stuck with me, since it seemed mistaken. So I shouldn’t have said “generally accepted,” just “I vaguely remember the world arguing a decade or so ago that 60Hz was good enough in all situations, e.g. competitive gaming.”
Being truer to reality where movement is continuous is not a subjective assessment. It doesn't look different, it looks more like what it's supposed to if realism is the goal. That's not a matter of taste.
Yes this a (computer) CRT thing. The commenter might be misremembering the exact numbers, 60 Hz baseline is a flat panel thing, by the mid to late 90s, 75 Hz was something a typical computer CRT would generally aim for and was part of various standards and recommendations.
> 60 Hz baseline is a flat panel thing
It's so many things, starting with the North American electric grid, NTSC, etc.
Yes my graphics card + monitor could theoretically run at more than 60 Hz. When I got to choose between resolution and refresh rate, I picked resolution. Hence 60 Hz.
The author didn’t say that they have a use for those 3200 updates per second other than as a workaround for some other issue. With a competently composited desktop and applications that pace input processing and frame generation well, and ignoring pointer acceleration, 1 correctly timed update per frame is enough. (As far as I know this does not exist from any vendor on a modern system other than for games, although really old Apple II-era software often got it right.). For acceleration, some pointer history is needed. And no one has a mouse that has an API that allows the host to pace the updates.
Presumably the 3200 Hz is needed for a combination of reasons:
- Under ideal conditions, if you want less than 10% variation in the number of samples per frame at 240Hz, you may need ~2400Hz. This effect is visible even by human eyeballs — you can see multiple cursor images across your field of view, and uneven spacing is noticeable.
- The mouse itself may work less well at a lower sampling rate.
- The OS and input stack may be poorly designed and work better at higher rates.
In any case, the application and cursor implementation are unlikely to ask for a mouse location more than once per frame, so the user is not really using 3200 updates per second, but that’s irrelevant.
First it's settings not real numbers. I'm not claiming that's how the mice actually perform, only how I tell them to perform.
Second 3200 was DPI not Hz. I can trivially tell how much I have to move with 3200 DPI (my sweet spot with 2 4K monitors), 4800 DPI, and 6400.
For Hz, it was the polling rate. With a configured 8000 Hz polling rate which is a lie/peak, I still see stalls in the 4ms range with my hardware.
As to acceleration I disable it. To truly lose it at high DPIs I've had to install RawAccel on Microsoft Windows.
Does this tool measure something different than? https://joltfly.com/mouse-latency-test/
Yes, pointerrawupdate events for this one, mousemove for the one you linked. The latter tends to sync to the display in my very limited experience.
There are other differences in the tools, mine was designed for what I wanted to understand so I'm biased toward it.
As per the post, I wrote this tool to confirm I was getting jerks of ~10ms every few seconds on one USB port and not the other. This would _suggest_ I can catch differences around the ballpark of 100 Hz.
I'm game for a randomized blinded test on 120 Hz refresh rate vs 240 Hz refresh rate. I would indeed be very curious to confirm I can tell the difference with a proper protocol.
Many years back (we were on CRTs), I was in similar shoes, convinced my friend couldn't tell the difference between 60 Hz and 90 Hz when playing video games.
Turns out he only needed to look at the pointer through one push of the mouse to tell right away, successful 100% of the time in a blinded experiment.
As to how you can perceive the difference between 120 events per second and 240, I have what I hope is a fairly simple explanation.
It's like lightning strokes of tens of microseconds making a lasting impression on your perception of the scene. You don't "count" strokes over time, but in space.
When you make circles fast and large enough on screen, you can evaluate the number of cursors that appear before your eyes. At 4 circles per second, is each circle made of ~60 pointers or ~30? Belief not fact: it's not hard to guess.