I've seen several posts of people griping that their rigs aren't delivering a constant 60FPS. However, short of constantly monitoring the FPS readout, I don't notice any lag during actual missions. For me, a minimum of 30FPS delivers smooth gameplay (although I can't say the same of cut scenes) and I find a minimum of ~12FPS to be tolerable. Not smooth, but playable. Below that, it becomes unbearably choppy. How about you guys? What FPS do you find acceptable for SC2?
When it comes to video the higher the constant Frame Rate the better. As far as how low it can go why would you want it to be slow?
Actually SC2 will put a little popup on the screen in game when the fps is getting to low for it's liking. And if you get that message a few times, then it's time to lower the SC2 settings or get new hardware.
I was testing SC2 on an Atom/ION build and they actually give you that message if you drop below 10 FPS. I guess Blizzard figures above 10 FPS is playable. I was mostly just curious about what framerates you guys consider acceptable for SC2. 60 FPS (which coincides with most displays' 60Hz refresh rate) seems to be what a lot of people think as the minimum framerate to play on (there was one poster complaining he was only getting 40-50 FPS on Ultra) but I actually find the game quite smooth even at half that. On my i7-860+GTS 250 1680x1050 Ultra, I get minimum framerates of 38~39 FPS, although most of the time, it's at 60+.
The human eye sees an average of 32 frames per second. Past this FPS on games, you won't be able to see individual frames, thus the game will look incredibly smooth. 30FPS, for all intents and purposes is the very minimum for 'smooth' gameplay, anything higher is icing on the cake.
The first claim is sort of true, but the second is not. There are a lot of misunderstandings about vision. Here comes the science... Firstly, your eyes are not digital -- light hits them continuously, and stimulates the retina continuously. It takes time for a stimulated region to fade back to normal. A light moving across your field of view will stimulate a smooth continuous streak because of the time it takes to fade. Now, if you're looking at a monitor, where an object is moving as quickly across your field of vision, but the picture is 32fps, then that isn't going to be stimulate a streak across your retina. The image is not continuously moving. It's jumping from one position to another. Your retina will be stimulated in patches corresponding to those positions, not in a smooth continuous streak. Secondly, it is your brain that samples at so many fps, and not your eyes. And if your retina hasn't recorded a smooth continuous streak of light, then your brain doesn't see that either. It will see several copies of the zergling in a row as its run across the screen in several discrete steps. The brain actually samples at around 10fps. The faster the framerate of your video, the better the light approximates the optical effect on the retina caused by real moving objects. To put it simply, the higher the frame rate the better.
