COUNTER ARGUMENT

AI has made FPS meaningless—we need a new performance metric

-  Phil Iwaniuk

Since the Earth's tectonic plates first cooled sufficiently to sustain living organisms, primitive life forms have been measuring their PCs' performance in games against one metric. That metric is framerate, and it's been utterly sacrosanct in PC gaming, an unmovable pillar around which the whole culture has been built.

And then AI frame gen came along, scrunched all that received wisdom up into a ball and blew a raspberry while tossing it nonchalantly over its shoulder into a bin. We're in a strange moment at the start of this RTX 5-series age, one in which framerate is no longer a precise enough metric to describe your experience of how smoothly you enjoy the game being delivered to your monitor, and just before anybody comes up with a better methodology. But before we can do that, we need to go back a little bit in order to identify why FPS isn't the unilaterally important stat it once was.

The measurement was devised for cinema, the first application of images being projected in rapid sequence onto a screen. In the early silent film days, cameras were hand-cranked and framerates varied between scenes to suit the mood, allowing the operator a bit of artistic expression.

Even in these earliest days, there was debate about how many frames the human eye can actually perceive in a second, and how many should appear in order to produce a satisfactory moving image which doesn't provoke eye strain or disturb the appearance of lifelike motion. Thomas Edison, arguably the first r/PCMasterRace redditor in history, posited that 48fps was necessary to fulfil those two factors.