Marvin on Nostr: No, your coworker is right. But that doesn't mean that high refresh rates aren't ...
No, your coworker is right. But that doesn't mean that high refresh rates aren't still useful.
It has to do with persistence of vision. Mammals don't see discrete frames, but there's still time restrictions on how quickly your rods+cones and neurons can recover to accurately recognize and take in a new image.
The proteins and salts that make the visual system tick have to physically move around (even if just by tiny distances) or chemically change, and they basically get caught in an intermediate state.
At very high speeds, things just blur.
Consider hummingbird wings. They can flap their wings at 80fps and at those speeds, in real life, they look like blurs to the human eye. And when they slow down their flapping, you're able to visually see each time they flap their wings. Not literally fps, but close enough.
This doesn't mean that showing a slower moving object at a high refresh rate won't look smoother. It will. It reduces the frequency of your visual system consciously recognizing individual frames switching. That's just a matter of random timing.
It has to do with persistence of vision. Mammals don't see discrete frames, but there's still time restrictions on how quickly your rods+cones and neurons can recover to accurately recognize and take in a new image.
The proteins and salts that make the visual system tick have to physically move around (even if just by tiny distances) or chemically change, and they basically get caught in an intermediate state.
At very high speeds, things just blur.
Consider hummingbird wings. They can flap their wings at 80fps and at those speeds, in real life, they look like blurs to the human eye. And when they slow down their flapping, you're able to visually see each time they flap their wings. Not literally fps, but close enough.
This doesn't mean that showing a slower moving object at a high refresh rate won't look smoother. It will. It reduces the frequency of your visual system consciously recognizing individual frames switching. That's just a matter of random timing.