[chadaustin]

Where does this “can’t see more than 60 fps” rumor come from?

It’s trivially refutable by placing a 60 Hz strobe (e.g. old fluorescent light or even some aftermarket headlights) at the corner of your vision.

Also, for interactive systems, 16 ms is a large chunk of our reaction time. You need close to 1 ms response times (1000 fps) to approximate pen and paper.

[jbverschoor]

I don’t know where it came from.. it was already there in the CRT times.

A simple google on 60 fps will still show these “scientists” who claim that we can perceive anything higher than 30-60 fps.

“Science” does NOT equal truth.

[Eisenstein]

You seem to be the only one claiming this bit of 'science'. No one else has heard of this claim.

[manderley]

With CRT monitors, different refresh rates very really easy to spot - 60 Hz was very flickery.

[wtallis]

Yeah, 60Hz on a CRT was more or less the minimum tolerable refresh rate, and 75-85Hz was noticeably better. And that's just for trying to display a static image without distracting flickering. Displaying smooth motion is a lot harder.

[eviks]

Try to do better than a simple google, maybe you'll actually stumble on real science which would help understand the difference between the linked claims about hearing and yours about vision

[Lapha]

The topic of human vision and perception is complex enough that I very much doubt it's scientists who are making the claim that we can't perceive anything higher than 30-60fps. There's various other effects like fluidity of motion, the flicker fusion threshold, persistence of vision, and strobing effects (think phantom array/wagon wheel effects), etc, which all have different answers. For example, the flicker fusion threshold can be as high as 500hz[0], similarly strobing effects like dragging your mouse across the screen are still perceivable on 144hz+ and supposedly 480hz monitors.

As far as perceiving images goes, there's a study at [1] which shows people can reliably identify images shown on screen for 13ms (75hz, the refresh rate of the monitor they were using). That is, subjects were shown a sequence of 6-12 distinct images 13ms apart and were still able to reliably able to identify a particular image in that sequence. What's noteworthy is this study is commonly cited for the claims that humans can only perceive 30-60fps, despite the study addressing a completely separate issue to perception of framerates, and is a massive improvement over previous studies which show figures as high as 80-100ms, which seems like a believable figure if they were using a similar or worse methodology. I can easily see this and similar studies being the source of the claims that people can only process 10-13 images a second, or perceive 30-60 fps, if science 'journalists' are lazily plugging something like 1000/80 into a calculator without having read the study.

There's also the old claim [2] from at least 2001 that the USAF studied fighter pilots and found that they can identify planes shown on screen for 4.5ms, 1/220th of a second, 1/225th of a second, or various other figures, but I can't find the source for this and I'm sure it's more of an urban legend that circulated gaming forums in the early 2000s than anything. If it was an actual study I'm almost certain perception of vision played a role in this, something the study at [1] avoids entirely.

[0] 'Humans perceive flicker artifacts at 500 Hz' https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25644611/

[1] 'Detecting meaning in RSVP at 13 ms per picture' https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/107157/13414_...

[2] http://amo.net/nt/02-21-01fps.html