Human Eye Can Only See at 60 FPS

Submission 39,292

Part of a series on The Glorious PC Gaming Master Race. [View Related Entries]

About

Human Eye Can Only See at 60 FPS is an internet myth stating that the human eye can only see up to a certain amount of frames per second (generally 60, though sometimes 30) before the moving image appears blurry, making the claim some video games tout of having extremely high frame rates useless. However, the claim that the eye can only see 60 FPS has been proven false in numerous online threads and it is a running point of pride in the PC Master Race community to say that the myth is perpetuated by "inferior" console users.

Origin

Discussion about the limits of how many FPS the human eye can perceive have long been a part of online culture. One of the earliest threads discussing the topic appeared on Hardware Central on April 25th, 1999.^[1] In the thread, some users stated that anything above 30 FPS the eye interprets as fluid motion, or that younger children could see up to 55 or 60 FPS.

Spread

Another thread about the topic was posted to the forums of anandtech,^[2] where some users claimed the eye could see up to 150 FPS, and others citing studies that claimed the human eye could see up to 220 FPS. The 220 FPS claim comes from a study supposedly done by the US Air Force in which pilots were able to accurately see images at 220 FPS. Mention of this study was published on AMO.net in 2001^[3] and was reposted to Reddit in 2014^[4] (shown below).

Debate about the topic continued online in the years to come. Threads debunking the claim have appeared on the World of Warcraft forums,^[5] Overclock,^[6] and mmo-champion.^[7] Most figured the myth originated because of the way films and monitors showed moving images, and that the limit of the technology influenced people into assuming that the limit was around 60 FPS. According to the mmo-champion breakdown:

TL;DR:
- Human's eye can see up to 1000 FPS and, perhaps, above.
- 60Hz monitor will always show 60 FPS, no matter how much FPS your game is able to provide.
- High refresh rates are noticeable only in dynamic scenes; in slow or static scenes you rarely will see any difference beyond 30 FPS.

Additionally, the myth has become fodder for jokes in the PC gaming community who say it is perpetuated by console gamers with inferior hardware. For example, an Imgur post from September 23rd, 2017 used the Your Mother and I Will Always Love You template to make a joke about it (shown below, left). A joke on /r/pcmasterrace using the Will We Find Intelligent Life? template gained over 13,000 upvotes (shown below, right).