What is the Future of BFI as a Feature?

[HappyHubris]

Random update:

I mostly haven't been attempting strobing since the games I was focused on (Diablo 4 and then Baldur's Gate 3) looked pretty terrible with it for various reasons. But I recently started replaying Witcher 3 (never finished) with today's GPU horsepower, and have discovered strobing Nirvana.

I wanted to play around with a ray-traced title and my first thought was to play it with the feature turned on. The visuals were spectacular! But my poor GPU vendor choice - AMD - meant that this ray-traced experience was stuck in the 60s for FPS @ 3440x1440, which made for a blurry, sloppy experience.

So on a lark I decided to turn off RT, turn on VSync, and turn on stobing. And...wow. This type of game really plays to my panel's strengths: Low cross-talk on the lower half of the screen looks great for moving across terrain, and the worse cross-talk on the upper third of the monitor is mostly sky or background elements that my eye ignores. Moving through the ample foliage with strobing is just a delight, and even without ray tracing the DX12 version updates make for a really pretty experience. 9/10; strongly recommended.

[Chief Blur Buster]

So on a lark I decided to turn off RT, turn on VSync, and turn on stobing. And...wow. This type of game really plays to my panel's strengths: Low cross-talk on the lower half of the screen looks great for moving across terrain, and the worse cross-talk on the upper third of the monitor is mostly sky or background elements that my eye ignores. Moving through the ample foliage with strobing is just a delight, and even without ray tracing the DX12 version updates make for a really pretty experience. 9/10; strongly recommended.

Use refresh rate headroom (e.g. drive a 240Hz panel at 120Hz) to fix the crosstalk. Hertz headroom allows 240Hz+ displays to behave like "Luxury 100Hz CRT tubes". 100-120Hz strobing on 240Hz panels look better than 100-120Hz strobing on 144Hz panels. Use The Hertz Headroom Trick if you hate crosstalk!

[HappyHubris]

Does that work for say running a 144hz display at 72Hz?

[Chief Blur Buster]

Does that work for say running a 144hz display at 72Hz?

It can, depending on model.

Remember BenQ 144Hz LCDs have a minimum strobe Hz of 75Hz, so use 75 instead of 72 if you're using a BenQ 144Hz display. 75Hz+QFT strobe on a BenQ XL2411Z, has much less crosstalk than 144Hz native strobe, for sure.

The VT1350 trick was popular doing 120Hz with lower crosstalk on many old BenQ 144Hz gaming monitors, with www.blurbusters.com/strobe-utility but if you were buying new, and need a flexible refresh rate range, I recommend XG2431 which can strobe 59-241Hz in literally 0.001Hz increments at www.blurbusters.com/xg2431 The bigger the refresh rate headroom margin, the less crosstalk, so 60-100Hz on the XG2431, with QFT modes, is nigh nearly crosstalk free.

Some other models do have single strobe, but not all of them -- 60Hz single strobe is not found on many BenQ gaming monitors.

[Supermodel_Evelynn]

I am one of those Anti 1000HZ people.

Reason being is because most games will never run anywhere near 1000 FPS not even close a RTX 4090 that costs $2500 USD and destroys your electric bill struggles to run games like Remnant 2 at 60 FPS. I mean by 2035 you could have hardware that will run it at 500 FPS no doubt and maybe 2050 you will be able to run games now at 1000 FPS.

But even then fighting games like street fighter, Tekken, Mortal Kombat etc will all still be running at 60 FPS due to game logic.

What I want to see is not 1000 HZ but things that truly matter

1) Glossy Coating since those Matte coating makes the image dull and hazy
2) 1500 Nit OLED SDR which can run at 320 Nits with BFI enabled and 60hz strobe, it may end up being Micro LED by that time.
3) Ability to use VRR and no need for large vertical total tinkering.

This is the holy grail of monitors, NOT 1000HZ.
Diminishing return of refresh rate benefit starts at 90hz, and its difficult to notice the difference when you cross 120HZ and near impossible after 144HZ unless you are an Esport God in your 20's doped up on redbull energy drinks in an arena with $1 Million USD Prize pool on the line playing CS GO with a 360HZ monitor set to 640x480 stretched 4:3 resolution across a wide screen so you can pixel split and react with a flick shot head shot in a nano second.

Remember when the world was blown away when One Plus released One Plus 7 Phone that supported 90HZ for the first time in a smartphone? then higher refresh rates started coming out and people didn't seem blown away after that?

From my experience going from 60 HZ to 90HZ feels like going from 30 HZ to 60 HZ all over again.
But after that it's meh.

I genuinely cannot tell the difference between 144 HZ to and 360 HZ having used both, UNLESS it was moving a mouse on the desktop. 99% of people will never be able to notice the difference after crossing 120HZ when gaming

[jorimt]

I am one of those Anti 1000HZ people.

Reason being is because most games will never run anywhere near 1000 FPS not even close a RTX 4090 that costs $2500 USD and destroys your electric bill struggles to run games like Remnant 2 at 60 FPS.

The higher the refresh rate, the less perceivable the tearing, regardless of achievable framerate. I.E. a fighting game running at 60 FPS 1000Hz with G-SYNC off + V-SYNC off (in a non-strobed scenario, at least) will have virtually no perceivable tearing artifacts and lower overall latency than 60 FPS 60Hz.

Finite refresh rates need not ultimately exist, and are merely a limitation of our time.

[Supermodel_Evelynn]

I am one of those Anti 1000HZ people.

Reason being is because most games will never run anywhere near 1000 FPS not even close a RTX 4090 that costs $2500 USD and destroys your electric bill struggles to run games like Remnant 2 at 60 FPS.

The higher the refresh rate, the less perceivable the tearing, regardless of achievable framerate. I.E. a fighting game running at 60 FPS 1000Hz with G-SYNC off + V-SYNC off (in a non-strobed scenario, at least) will have virtually no perceivable tearing artifacts and lower overall latency than 60 FPS 60Hz.

Finite refresh rates need not ultimately exist, and are merely a limitation of our time.

Are you sure?

Blur busters said frame rate needs to match hz else you will get duplicates

[jorimt]

Are you sure?

Blur busters said frame rate needs to match hz else you will get duplicates

I wasn't referring to strobing. As noted in my previous comment:

The higher the refresh rate, the less perceivable the tearing, regardless of achievable framerate. I.E. a fighting game running at 60 FPS 1000Hz with G-SYNC off + V-SYNC off (in a non-strobed scenario, at least) will have virtually no perceivable tearing artifacts and lower overall latency than 60 FPS 60Hz.

BFI, even on a 1000Hz monitor, will still need to be framerate = Hz.

What I was saying is that 1000Hz is not even close to useless just because it won't be immediately practical for BFI usage in all cases.

BFI itself is merely a stop-gap to MPRT motion clarity improvement like G-SYNC is to tearing-prevention on the road to eventual non-finite framerates and refresh rates.

But yes, legacy games limited by lower fixed framerates will always be an issue where non-strobed MPRT is concerned, sans possible future low lag interpolation techniques or the like (though even that may be problematic for fighting games that rely on exact animation timings).

[Chief Blur Buster]

I genuinely cannot tell the difference between 144 HZ to and 360 HZ having used both, UNLESS it was moving a mouse on the desktop. 99% of people will never be able to notice the difference after crossing 120HZ when gaming

That's normal; it's a big problem in current content.

For current GPUs, current screens, and current games, you're right.
For future GPUs, future screens, and future games, you're wrong.

This is the holy grail of monitors, NOT 1000HZ.
Diminishing return of refresh rate benefit starts at 90hz, and its difficult to notice the difference when you cross 120HZ and near impossible after 144HZ unless you are an Esport God in your 20's doped up on redbull energy drinks in an arena with $1 Million USD Prize pool on the line playing CS GO with a 360HZ monitor set to 640x480 stretched 4:3 resolution across a wide screen so you can pixel split and react with a flick shot head shot in a nano second.

The gaming world is not all about FPS games. There's a lot of other use cases where high Hz is more important than FPS. The mainstream news often brainwashes people on the hidden benefits of Hz.

LCD pixel response and game content is a major problem in the quality of refresh rate comparisons. 144-vs-360 is extremely minor if you can't push 360fps, and VSYNC OFF also diminishes differences between refresh rates. The type of games you play have a major impact on whether refresh rate matters or not. In panning-map tests, more than 95% of mainstream population was able to tell 240-vs-1000. So the right type of tests, can clearly show it.

Also, the framerate will eventually be a solvable problem with large-ratio framegen methods. I have software on my disk that multiplies frame rate by 10x: www.blurbusters.com/framegen

I am a HATER of refresh rate incrementalism (because it creates anti-1000Hz people like you), because they haven't seen the real improvements beyond 120 yet. People like these are like being against 1980s Japanese HDTV researchers, we are the temporal equivalent of early bird Hz research.

The real mainstream benefit (Beyond 120Hz) will be 4x refresh rate differences and frame rate differences, combined with extremely fast pixel response, and proper frame sync (framerate=Hz). Long-term, we need to refactor the frame rendering pipeline.

Anyway, telling people not to blur bust is generally against rules on these forums. Extra refresh rate is refresh-rate-based motion blur reduction. People who are anti-BlurBusters, usually quickly get banned from these forums -- so please nuance your post as "My opinion is..." but you should never (on Blur Busters) order people not to buy high-Hz. Tell people more nuanced "For that specific game, that game doesn't really benefit from Hz as much. Also, I can't tell 144Hz vs 360Hz in that particular game".

Once you're beyond 120, most of the mainstream need ~4x differences to see it very clearly (mainstreamed) while being faster than LCD. While running a game capable of framerate=Hz obviously (a big problem). 144-vs-360 is just like saying "I can do calculus because I know how to do 2+2" -- because you haven't seen the future, just like people who do 2+2 doesn't necessarily know Calculus.

Most people just load a few games, that don't run at the frame rate. 60fps looks the same at 144Hz and 360Hz, motion blur is bottlenecked to frametime, so more Hz isn't useful if you are unable to generate the frame rate. A bigger screen with a bigger FOV, with higher resolution, also amplifies refresh rate limitations. 4K 120-vs-240 is more noticeable than 1080p 120-vs-240, especially if the display is bigger.

But we write about frame rate problems -- e.g. www.blurbusters.com/framegen -- That's why the industry leaves too much framerate on the table, even Linus Tech Tips complains. He complains it in this YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvqrlgKuowE that the big GPU companies can easily give us 240-1000fps, but they don't (yet), partially due to structural workflow problems in the software developer industry that isn't very friendly to lagless framegen (yet).

[Chief Blur Buster]

Blur busters said frame rate needs to match hz else you will get duplicates

Only if you're strobing.

There's more than 1 way to blur bust.

1. Strobing method
You want framerate=Hz to avoid duplicate images. So yes, you can lower your refresh rate. But you get dimmer image and crosstalk. It is stuck with Talbot-Plateau Theorem, where briefer flashes creates dimmer pictures.

2. Strobeless method
There's no duplicate images with this. If your eyes get pain from strobing, the only way to reduce motion blur is by extra frame rate. 480fps OLED has 1/4th the motion blur of 120fps OLED.

Different pros/cons.

Also, Supermodel_Evelynn if you claim to tell apart PureXP Ultra and PureXP Extreme. You were unhappy with brighter versions of PureXP because it had more motion blur. Guess what?

At 240Hz:
PureXP Ultra = 1/2400sec MPRT = same clarity as 2400fps 2400Hz OLED without BFI
PureXP Extreme = 2/2400sec MPRT = same clarity 1200fps 1200Hz OLED without BFI
PureXP Normal = 3/2400sec MPRT = same clarity as 800fps 800Hz OLED without BFI
PureXP Light = 4/2400sec MPRT = same clarity as 600fps 600Hz OLED without BFI

Now that said, other settings can have more crosstalk (double images) without the custom Large Vertical Total tweaks (via ToastyX Custom Resolution Utility), needed to reduce double images on XG2431. The manufacturer didn't include that automatic capability out of the box sadly, but at least I convinced users to let them DIY all these custom modes.

Either way:
Around here, you must respect all methods of blur busting.
1. BFI/Strobe-based blur reduction (double images, dimmer, but very efficient)
2. Framerate-based blur reduction (brighter & no double images, but requires brute force)

It's needed to respect everyday mainstream users who Method #1 and Method #2.

Blur Busters is the Hz equivalent of 1980s Japan HDTV researchers. Even the 1980s analog HDTV was blurrier than DVD-quality, and it improved massively over time. A large part of the problem is LCD. 144-vs-360 is a very minor difference on LCD especially in games incapable of framerate=Hz.

If you want to call scam, then complain about the unused framerate opportunities still left on the table (just like Linus Tech Tips and other people also complained about). In 20 years from now, 1000Hz may be a freebie feature, and we need to go sharper up the curve of diminishing returns, since 120-vs-1000 makes for a bigger visible difference, like the temporal version of "going from VHS to 8K" instead of "going from 720p to 1080p".