Effects of Frame Rates up to 500 Hz on First Person Shooter Game Players

Computer games – and computer game players – often drive technology improvements, with graphics cards and monitors pushing the limits of display technologies. High frame rates, in particular, promise to provide lower latencies and smoother game visuals to gamers, especially important for competitive first-person shooter (FPS) game players. What is not well-known is to what extent gamers benefit from ultra-high frame rates in terms of player performance and quality of experience. This paper studies the effects of frame rates – especially high frame rates – on FPS game players. We developed a custom FPS game that provides a consistent delivery of frame rates from 7 f/s to 500 f/s, while recording objective (performance) and subjective (smoothness) measures. Analysis of data from a 44-person user study shows player performance (e.g., score and accuracy) improves sharply from 7+ f/s, but levels out after about 90 f/s. However, users’ perception benefits over the full range of frame rates studied, rising sharply from 7+ f/s, and continuing to improve through 500 f/s. In addition, we compare our results with prior work assessing the effects of frame rates across multiple controlled game tasks, finding common trends in the low-to-mid frame rate ranges for most tasks, with a few notable differences.