Why do so many people think there is an fps limit to human vision?

[Legend]

It comes up all the time, people claiming 60 or 120 fps is the max a human can see.

There is no limit. Even 10,000 fps is not as good as 20,000 fps, under certain situations.


I thought it would have stopped now that many screens are 120 fps but nope.

[kitler53]

I can't even tell 60 from 30. 

[the-pi-guy]

There is no limit. Even 10,000 fps is not as good as 20,000 fps, under certain situations.

I mean there's probably a limit somewhere...  

One of the issues is that the eye doesn't see framerate the way that computers do. Which I'm assuming you're aware of, since you mention the 20,000 number.  

Being able to tell that a light was flashed in a 1/20,000th of a second is a different kind of processing than being able to see motion on a screen. 

Why do so many people think there is an fps limit to human vision?

I assume most people are just generalizing from their limited experience, and aren't basing it off any kind of actual science.

[Legend]

I mean there's probably a limit somewhere... 

One of the issues is that the eye doesn't see framerate the way that computers do. Which I'm assuming you're aware of, since you mention the 20,000 number.

Being able to tell that a light was flashed in a 1/20,000th of a second is a different kind of processing than being able to see motion on a screen.

I assume most people are just generalizing from their limited experience, and aren't basing it off any kind of actual science.

The lack of a limit is because our heads/eyes can track objects, not because a short flash is visible.

A 1/20,000th of a second image flash will persist in your brain much longer, but it won't have much time to smear across different cones and rodes as your eye moves. It's why most VR headsets use displays that flash the frame and then turn black until the next frame is ready.

Say you have a 4K screen and you have a little bad guy running from the left to the right in a 10th of a second. If your eyes lock on him then he should become crystal clear, yet you'd need each frame to display for ~1/20,000th of a second to pull this off.



What prompted my thread was people trying to use real science hahaha. One tweet said humans couldn't see above 60 and a bunch of people called him an idiot while saying the actual limit was 75-120 and linking studies.