Where did you get 60 as generally accepted from?

> I can buy that humans can see at least 120hz at a minimum. 60Hz is the generally accepted threshold, but I’ve long suspected that 120Hz has mostly imperceptible effects that are still noticeable, if rarely.

There are videos on youtube showing people perceive differences at much higher framerates. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX31kZbAXsA (long video, so you can skip to the end - they found that even casual players were performing measurably more consistently at 240Hz than even 144Hz.)

Anecdotally, I recently switched to playing racing games at 165FPS and the difference is massive!

As per the post, I wrote this tool to confirm I was getting jerks of ~10ms every few seconds on one USB port and not the other. This would _suggest_ I can catch differences around the ballpark of 100 Hz.

I'm game for a randomized blinded test on 120 Hz refresh rate vs 240 Hz refresh rate. I would indeed be very curious to confirm I can tell the difference with a proper protocol.

Many years back (we were on CRTs), I was in similar shoes, convinced my friend couldn't tell the difference between 60 Hz and 90 Hz when playing video games.

Turns out he only needed to look at the pointer through one push of the mouse to tell right away, successful 100% of the time in a blinded experiment.

Higher refresh rates don't have to be perceptible to be useful: they can shift the balance in head-to-head gaming.

Imagine 2 identical gaming setups with 2 players that have the same skill set. In an FPS game, you'd expect each of those players to win 50% of the games.

Now switch one monitor from 120Hz to 240Hz. On average, the player on the 240Hz monitor will see their adversary 4ms earlier than the player on the 120Hz monitor and thus be able to push the mouse button earlier too.

The author didn’t say that they have a use for those 3200 updates per second other than as a workaround for some other issue. With a competently composited desktop and applications that pace input processing and frame generation well, and ignoring pointer acceleration, 1 correctly timed update per frame is enough. (As far as I know this does not exist from any vendor on a modern system other than for games, although really old Apple II-era software often got it right.). For acceleration, some pointer history is needed. And no one has a mouse that has an API that allows the host to pace the updates.

Presumably the 3200 Hz is needed for a combination of reasons:

- Under ideal conditions, if you want less than 10% variation in the number of samples per frame at 240Hz, you may need ~2400Hz. This effect is visible even by human eyeballs — you can see multiple cursor images across your field of view, and uneven spacing is noticeable.

- The mouse itself may work less well at a lower sampling rate.

- The OS and input stack may be poorly designed and work better at higher rates.

In any case, the application and cursor implementation are unlikely to ask for a mouse location more than once per frame, so the user is not really using 3200 updates per second, but that’s irrelevant.

How much latency you can perceive greatly depends on the context. But in the right context humans can perceive display latency down close to 1 ms as demonstrated by Microsoft Research many years ago. There is no excuse to be skeptical about that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4

So tired of defending against this same, old, completely wrong intuition from people especially those saying "do the science" to justify their ignorance instead of looking themselves since the science has already been done and it's coming up on a full century old.

From this one paper alone, humans can perceive information from a single frame at 2000 Hz.

https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1945.9917254

Humans can read numbers and reproduce them immediately a 5 digit number is displayed for 1 frame at 400 fps. This is a single exposure, it is not a looping thing with persistence of vision or anything like that. 7 digit numbers required the framerate to be 333 fps. Another student produced 9 digit number from a single frame at 300 fps. These were the average results. The record results were a correct reproduction of a 7 digit number from a single viewing of a single frame at 2000 Hz. This was the limit within 2% accuracy of the tachistoscopic equipment in question. From the progression of the students chasing records, no slowing of their progression had ever been in sight. The later papers from this author involve considerable engineering difficulty to construct an even faster tachistocope and are limited by 1930s-1940s technology.

This research led the US Navy in WW2 to adopt tachistotopic training methods for aircraft recognition replacing the WEFT paradigm (which had approximately a 0% success rate) to a 1 frame at 75 fps paradigm which led to 95% of cadets reaching 80% accuracy on recognition, and 100% of cadets reaching 62.5% accuracy after just 50 sessions.

Yes, humans can see 2000 fps. Yes, humans can see well beyond 2000 fps in later work from this researcher.

https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1945.9917254

Yes, humans can detect flicker well above 1000 fps in daily life at the periphery of vision with cone cells as cone cells can fire from a single photon of light and our edge detection circuits operate at a far higher frequency than our luminance and flicker-fusion circuits. Here's flicker being discriminated from steady light at an average of 2 kHz for 40 degree saccades, and an upper limit above 5 kHz during 20 degree saccades, which would be much more typical for eyes on a computer monitor.

There is no known upper limit to the frequency of human vision that is detectable. As far as I know, all studies (such as this one I link) have always been able to measure up to the reliable detection limit of their equipment, never up to a human limit.

There could be side-effects of these higher rates that are noticeable, or bugs in handling different rates.

> Experiments like this have decisively settled the “Does higher sampling rate matter when listening to music?” debate...

Not really relevant. Music is experienced after a Fourier transform, in frequency space,

The more telling example is that experienced drummers get frustrated by lag of 2 ms from computer-generated effects. That's 500 Hz.

I’m happy with my $5 wired Logitech mouse as it’s got essentially zero lag, never runs out of batteries and unlike the high end Logitech mice has no “rubber” which tends to invariably go icky over time.

At one point I had a Razer wireless mouse (Mamba I think?) which had no discernible latency and a nice dock for recharging the mouse, I was very happy with it until one evening it just stopped working. While alone in my flat, I stepped away from using my computer for about an hour, didn’t even put it to sleep, came back, and it would no longer move but would still register mouse clicks. I tried contacting customer support asking if there was a way to reset it or reflash the firmware or something and they’re just like “nope”. Last piece of Razer hardware I ever bought.

Yes, I rely on pointerrawupdate. Thanks for letting me know! Unfortunately pointermove is typically synced with graphics in my limited experience, and I think I'd rather not show anything than provide wildly inaccurate numbers.

That's a recent invention. Only the latest gaming mice can poll at that rate, and not particularly well on USB2. They're usually limited to 1000.

Neat tool, though. I'm also very sensitive towards latency.

‘USB hub’ and ‘quality’ never go together.

I’d love to be wrong on this but haven’t been so far.

Yes, pointerrawupdate events for this one, mousemove for the one you linked. The latter tends to sync to the display in my very limited experience.

There are other differences in the tools, mine was designed for what I wanted to understand so I'm biased toward it.

[flagged]