LatencyFleX: A new approach to game latency reduction

That being said in the quake days I dont think monitors could go over 60hz anyways so even at 120FPS you were not gaining a similar advantage from what we have today. From what I remember however there were other advantages to high FPS in games like Counterstrike as well in terms of player movement - the monitor might have "smoothed" the motion back down to 60 fps but it still resulted in a more accurate experience.

I forget how refresh rate worked on CRT's though - maybe those could higher than 60?

And of course you can overclock an LCD monitor quite easily - most will not do much but there are some that I got to 90hz which (in my opinion) is a massive improvement compared to 60 and the 30hz difference is a much, much larger jump than the next jump from 90 to 120hz.

Part of that however is also highly related to motion blur - many big directors have done tests in theaters showing "HFR" content (like 60fps) and audiences distinctly said they did not like it on average. The D-Day scene from Saving Private Ryan is a good example - it was not shown HFR but they intentionally made the shutter speed faster to give it that "staccato" and jerky and gritty sort of feel. While in photography we use all kinds of shutters speeds for different effects (think of things like using a super fast shutter speed to freeze the propellers of a plane or using a very long shutter speed in a landscape photo with a river so that the river becomes a nice smooth blur) the movie industry mostly abides by the rule of "180 degree shutter" meaning that your shutter speed is 1 over 2x your fps (x=fps). So for most cinema shot at 24fps the shutter speed is 1/48 of a second.

The importance of this is that because you are not shooting still frames and instead of shooting a series of frames to be played back quickly this adds a motion blur effect that smooths the transition between frames and creates a sort of artistic look. There are technical limitations of this blurring (medium fast pans across a scene are a great example - the whole thing becomes too blurred and is hard to see). Any scene with slower moving objects such as people adds a sort of natural motion blur that many cinematographers believe is an artistically ideal choice.

Now that being said you do not need to abide by the 180 degree shutter with modern cameras (like Saving Private Ryan) and one can theoretically choose a variety of shutter speeds for different scenes regardless of what FPS one is shooting at. A fast pan could be shot at something like 1/120 and even at 24FPS it will appear much sharper and easier to make out individual objects (although perhaps not quite as smooth on the panning motion). However you are theoretically limited on the low end to a shutter speed that is approximately equal to your frame rate (or your shutter would be open LONGER than the frame itself and defeat the purpose of shooting "frames" in the first place). So theoretically we could move to 48 FPS content and still shoot at 1/48 and have the same amount of motion blur PER FRAME but also double the amount of frames which would be a large improvement from a technical sense. I haven't seen any films shot this way but I have experimented quite a bit with my own camera shooting at these kinds of speeds and it works quite well. You can also shoot at 24FPS and drag the shutter to 1/24 to get a full stop (double the amount of light) vs normal 24FPS footage if you are shooting in a very dark environment that is already pushing the limits of your cameras sensor. This of course introduces even more motion blur but depending on the scene it may not be very noticeable or even introduce interesting artistic looks.

TLDR: I think we should move to 48 FPS and shoot most content at a variety of shutter speeds, the most common being the already standard 1/48s shutter, and either increase or decrease that within reason depending on the nature of the scene and the desired artistic outcome.