Does High FPS make you a better gamer? Ft. Shroud - FINAL ANSWER

you guys loved our last video using a high-speed camera to investigate the real-world performance impact of upgrading to a high refresh rate gaming monitor but you also had some feedback on both our testing methodology and our gaming skills so for round 2 we reached out to Nvidia for the sponsorship we needed to take our tests to the next level thanks to them we are on location in the Santa Ana eSports arena we've got a much wider variety of tests and systems and we were able to get some of very special guests to come and participate representing the filthy casuals we've got yours truly and Paul from Paul's hardware and we are gonna get truly embarrassed today because in the pro gamer tier we've got Cory here from the Washington Justice eSports team I'm a general idea of what I'm doing today then we've got a couple of outstanding twitch streamers mr. Griffin's going from 144 to 240 kind of felt like us light upgrade for me and as so very many of you requested the one and only shroud going from 60 to 144 is like night and day for me obviously right but 144 to 240 so let's get down to business shall we so to measure the impact of monitor refresh rate and fps in game on our subjects we've built a suite of five tests going from synthetic reaction time tests to aiming tests to putting the whole thing together so behind me I have three identical systems except that they've got one key trait modified so they're all running core I 999 hundred K processors they're all running the same Acer predator 240 Hertz displays but their graphics cards have been altered system number one is running an RT X 2060 Super which is capable of running our test games today at anywhere from around 250 to 300 frames per second and it's monitor has been completely uncapped to 240 Hertz this is our best case scenario for competitive gamers or so we think we'll see how the results go today system number two is at the other end of the spectrum so our monitor trait has been turned all the way down to sixty Hertz but we went even further than that because having a very high-performance graphics card on a sixty Hertz display still does actually give you better responsiveness than if you had a lower performance graphics card so we have dropped our GPU all the way down to a GTX 750 this is going to give us anywhere from 70 to 85 fps in our games and finally by popular request representing the middle ground we've got our third monitor dialed into a hundred and forty-four Hertz and hooked up to a gtx 1650 that is going to push anywhere from around 150 to 185 200 FPS now just like last time our test subjects are gonna have no idea what hardware they're sitting down in front of until they actually starts a game and we're gonna be using high-speed cameras to record just their test scores that we could get out of the software but also the exact points they're aiming at and even how they aim so pulling that Duty we've got a couple of prototype cameras from our home boys Chronos that are capable of 1080p capture at a thousand FPS for 10 seconds at a time each giving us a total of 20 seconds of thousand FPS capture now because that's not long enough for some of our test pulling back up duty today is our red epic w8k camera that is going to be running at 1080p 240 FPS hey how's it going dude yeah okay so we set it up so that while we are running in engine tests in game tests rather than just like a web browser based skills trainer the tests are really designed to test your skills as opposed to test your ability at a game we actually had some special development done for this video in the wipe racking trainer so that we could get exactly the data okay and what is a white peg it's a workshop map by yes / that's basically like a combination of a whole bunch of different skills training things that you can do testing your reaction time testing your flick shot aiming capabilities your your flow kill rates as you have enemies popping up in your shooting gallery all kinds of cool stuff okay so we got a lot of tests we've got five different tests and we're gonna run them until we start to see statistical convergence and we can be confident in our results / gamer so you'll be trying at three different frame rates 60 fps 240 FPS and 144 FPS to determine where is that point of diminishing returns or does FPS make a difference at all our great gamers just great gamers is it FPS difference or an Hertz or is it let us FPS you know I'm saying what a wonderful question I am so glad to be working with people who get it today this is awesome so that matters because if you're running a 60 Hertz display but your graphics card is pumping out 300 frames per second in csgo and your framerate capped you are effectively getting much newer information on screen than you would be if your graphics card was only outputting let's say 70 75 frames per second so I was actually really late to the 120 Hertz monitor change so when I played Counter Strike I played on 60 Hertz and all the top players I had no money at the time because I was really young and all the top players had 120 Hertz they were on that nunu right and I was sitting there and I was on 60 and I was still doing great I swapped to 120 honestly it didn't really change that much so I do really think that if somebody played on a 60 Hertz long enough they would play just the same as playing as 144 long enough I guess we'll find out there's a lot of that today so I'm kori I go back quarry inside of game and I'm a damage dealer for the Washington Justice in overwatch I didn't really start using like 144 240 until I started playing overwatch interesting so that was quite recent for you then you're a late converter mm-hmm how much of an improvement are you expecting to see going from 60 frames per second to 144 and then from 144 to 240 60 to 124 is like a huge like 70% like you feel the difference yeah immediately see it yeah you really have to be looking at 144 to 240 yeah to really notice it but I'd say there's definitely a jump like a smaller jump together than a like 20% okay start on twitch about like four plus years ago I got really into actually started with fighting games believe it or not Ghana the shooters about like a year later and then I just kind of basically just rode the wave of like all the FPS you know evolution from like h1z1 to like pub G and all the games that you know today I understand I'm supposed to be representing a certain class of gamer you told me it was probably the best the best of the best the technology enthusiast class of gamer someone someone who builds more gaming computers than actually plays video games yes we've got five different tests and we're gonna run them until we start to see statistical convergence and we can be confident our results pro gamer test number one today is pure reaction times shroud clicks in order to indicate that he's ready for the test to begin and as soon as it turns green he clicks again as quickly as he can this tells us his raw reflexes about coffee so this is a great discussion Mike was hankering for a coffee and we actually turned him down because we shot the tests out of order and we've already done one without caffeine in the system so now we're just gonna have to see just that's this is it I'm just your biological steady-state I'm slow I'm sorry I'm slow yeah I just don't I don't think for this test specifically I don't think sixty to forty one forty four I don't think is gonna make a difference because you're I mean you're the only time you feel sixty verse two forty is when you're moving around like so and you can feel like the tear and everything it's just something that you're not used to but when you're standing still it's all the same so I don't think I'm gonna notice the difference in my mind I know that it does not feel good right cuz I'm on sixty and I'm like oh this feels terrible but I actually haven't done legitimate like stats and break it down and like maybe I did get less kills no I haven't Wow so one of the things our audience asked to figure out is whether you are in fact human and with that kind of consistency yes I can't say that I'm sure that's a really good is it yeah I mean so consistent back in my glory days maybe 1.5 consistent 1.72 now some of our tests are purely synthetic and a couple of them are really focused on your reaction time now everyone knows that gamers are basically over the hill by the time they turn 30 are you expecting your youth to be an advantage in those kinds of tests versus someone like me I'm 33 say yeah a little bit wow what a dick you know what this is over I mean helps a little bit I'd say a lot of it comes down to practice in the game because being used to be able to see like certain things like I was watching shroud do the the often in the middle of the double doors and if you're not familiar with doing that every single day then it would kind of make a little bit of a difference sure test number two is still a reaction time test but this time it's a practical one the classic double doors sniper position on dust2 so once you shoot to start at random intervals a counter-terrorist player is going to run across the door and jump across now these are BOTS so it will be in exactly the same location every time so right there on the second line on the truck there is about where he's gonna cross so this isn't about aiming no about just keeping it steady clicking one again correct okay how am I missing right now this is a real 64 tick I'm telling you I hit this guy at least three times okay that was a way but this is bad I guess this is a hard man I'll get him eventually I got nothing zero was that even possible like it looks to me like he's hitting it to see you guys no we double-checked the server tickets 128 that's not the issue it's not good oh sorry lattice don't apologize to me apologize to the millions of viewers Oh can you explain to both of us the science behind why those shots looked like they were hitting but did not register yeah so at 60 frames and Hertz you're kind of getting delay in two areas you're getting delay from the game state to what's actually being shown on screen so the guys actually in a little bit different spot because the rendering took long enough to reach your monitor additionally your input is also delighted so when you click that is gonna take a little bit longer time to actually reach the game set so you're getting you're getting kind of latency in both direction so pretty cool I don't know and you can see we have multiple frames of our thousand frame per second camera that correspond to a single frame on the monitor cuz it's only refreshing sixty times a second as I go it's probably pretty quick here so that was if there miss yeah but this one up here how how tippy-toes can you get cuz we can't really adjust this right now I'm good okay so this one right here crosshair that one's more arguable you kind of hit him in the tush mm-hmm so that tiny difference could be exactly what was just explained to us then maybe interesting hey I hope so cuz I make me look real bad so I'm gonna tell you something you absolutely smoked shroud and quarry in that test at 60 Hertz do you think you could train up at 60 and hit as many targets as you did at a higher refresh yeah definitely yeah I can't is honestly like when I was kind of like going through the test and I was kind of feeling like you know that slight delay it's almost like a pattern right you you don't want to press it too fast otherwise you're just gonna come up short so like I mentioned before like I came from buying games right we have like a big delay between like Xbox and Playstation especially when it comes down like three frame inputs and stuff like that for this one it's a little similar if you press it too soon even though you like you're confident you're gonna hit around the target you're gonna hit way before so you have to like kind of enter in your head that it's it's like a slight pattern because this one you have to like master a delay with a high refresh rate you just have to master more of a reaction time I would say like it it's more on towards that aspect high refresh rate doesn't make you a better gamer but it makes it easier to be a better game I would say so yeah I am older now I'm a dad not that that affects your reaction time it should get her of your reaction did you get a good night's sleep last night you know it wasn't bad it wasn't bad I only got up twice to change diapers if it makes you feel any better shroud only hit two out of 30 on this really yeah and same for Cory the legitimate actual professional gamer Oh so the reasons are saying that I should also be a legitimate professional gamer no that's not what I'm saying Grimm's hit four out of ten Wow consistently he does have a reputation for being pretty quick so you could mention something really interesting to me you said that because we're running at such a low framerate you can't really trust your eyes and you're just going off muscle memory hmm interesting I can't track you there mr. Hardin task number three we change things up again your reaction time still matters a lot because you've only got point four five seconds to hit each target at least this is your game how you feeling about this one you've got one minute to hit as many red dots as you can yeah I mean I feel pretty good so you just put up a 13 yeah in this one hmm that's really good I mean I'm missing like half of them like sure listen this guy missing half of them so is that just pure muscle memory you've got your own mouth today you just yeah I think yeah I think owning that one probably oh yeah oh yeah this guy he will he definitely definitely will for sure yeah but he's like a cocky mother so I don't want to root for it's my game like let's get professional they have to this is a hard test yeah even point for even point five seconds would make a big difference because I could tell there were ones were you know it was so close next up is test number four you need great reaction time so you can spot the bots popping up in our shooting gallery and you need to make your flick shots cuz they're not gonna stand still for long we're looking for your best time to make 15 kills this makes me look like I don't know how to play the game I swear it's the settings in the flow test can you name a name for someone that you think would just destroy that I would say I probably could name every every counter-strike professional you know they're all so good but if I was to name anybody out a name like somebody from Team Liquid so maybe like Stewie your raw reaction time improvement going from 62 to 40 was the cleanest out of anyone we tested today it was very noticeable to me and it was very consistent on the 60 Hertz I was about 210 immediately dropped down to around 180 and I even I think I had 142 or 146 at best which apparently makes me as good or better than strap trout I've been told I'm not sure if Wow yeah a 210 and how many did you get on sixty two out of a hundred and ten I think if like I feel like I'm doing the exact same theme thing and watching for him to just appear in the doorway and I'm clicking but incredible difference in how effective I wasn't this test on this test I got nine out of ten in comparison to the last test where I could barely get what a 30 I could how it doesn't make a difference I guess the answer is yeah well mind you this is just one test one test just one test so I'm what's interesting though is that when I was here looking at your reaction times in milliseconds they weren't that different so then it comes down to that delay between the frame being prepared and when it's drawn on the screen and registering the click to it's great that's crazy I was sitting there and it was just a piece of cake I was just like done done done and then the other one I just couldn't I couldn't land a shot he feels the same way right now that's a little bar I have to be hey I love it I think I'm fine full of it just cute time this is the first time I'm actually trying out like flick like programs or like yeah modes I feel actually pretty good about it like I mention I regret not doing this earlier because I feel like I was getting better and better so I definitely I definitely feel way better than I thought it was so you're definitely more comfortable shooting at human targets yeah like a straight absolutely 100% that was a completely different level feels very different 19.167 yeah compared to weren't you more in the neighborhood of 30 at 60 Hertz yeah I had two 19's on 30 and I had like 35 one time like 33 it's so much harder on the other set of so much harder all right so that's another under 20 yep I think I can go to 15 you think so I'm confident I can this one feels so weird though I'm actually just like just hoping I hit it in time cuz I feel like I have a whole second away as if you would have a whole second more on that one yeah yeah you can definitely it feels it's weird it feels like you actually have so much more time to react even though it's this in theory it's the same at a time well milliseconds worst-case scenario but then plus the actual input delay as well so in terms of the actual like refresh rate on the monitor it's very little but it actually is more than that so yeah it's crazy interesting so you just put up a nine out of 10 in the double doors that 144 yep so are you comfortable saying that 144 to 240 didn't really make a difference for you here in this exact situation now does it feels it I think the reason why this feels so so much the same is that it's it's kind of like a still it you're not really moving right you're just there looking for the cross and look what you got the good frames you got 144 very very similar and both of your frame rate and your refresh rate are exceeding the tick rate of the server yeah so you literally 10x your result in the flick shooting challenge going from 62 to 40 did it feel that much better yes I I was hitting more shots in particular the the doorway on csgo like I could barely touch it before like such poor performance and then suddenly I'm hitting seven like seven out of ten so I can't accept responsibility myself it's the technology it's that has given me this skill no it's great the difference the framerate and I heard something but the guy crossing the door it's so weird how I met that it's the same thing but it's just not it's weird so right now I'm doing 60 Hertz but on 300 frames instead of six year it's on like 80 frames yes it's harder than the 240 Hertz but it's not quite as hard as the 60 60 you know I mean but it definitely is easier for sure there's not as much I guess input lag is what I'd explain yeah I'd call it like Jo yeah it's weird that does it doesn't float as much as yeah floating floating that's not really good word for it that result is exactly like you'd describe the field right into Queen Ann at 60 fps and 240 240 mm-hmm so I had I think I had misunderstood this test I have to play a game to shroud just for the first you say that like it makes it a lot better so test number 5 is gonna be a good one and we've just got shroud dialing in his most DPI and in-game sensitivity settings until he's at the point where he feels like yeah it was pretty good ready to go now he does usually use a g pro Wireless instead of a G Pro with a wire so that might introduce a little bit of variability but at least it's the same basic sensor so yep hopefully it's alright so test number 5 is the shooting gallery test obviously everything we've seen so far is still synthetic in the sense that you're playing against bots now it's time to see if those skills translate into the real world and take on a human opponent I sure wish I could have picked my opponent here but I don't get to I did pick him but like not because I thought it would give me a chance to win hey you could beat me here yeah I don't think so so the way this test works is both competitors are going to be at the far end of a long hallway and Seth from Nvidia is going to be crouched behind a half-height wall and just popping up at random human intervals whoever kills him first gets a point we played a best-of-five then we get to switch computers so you're on the struggle bus computer yeah we'll see it's not what the pros do they switch to switch to their weapons real fast hey I got the jitters I got the jitters out the land jitters man we're competing I would wish you luck but you don't need it yeah yeah we're we're ready I guess late Oh what the hell I was still talking wait a minute when he is a silhouette as he hit a bull oh he's got spawn protection damn it come on we both lived yeah okay oh that's five nothing okay how do you like that machine this is rough it's okay I'll beer I'll be fine I still don't think I'm gonna win he was so fast I'm ready I'm ready all right let's try this oh there you go Crowl I got one nice shot I'm slow don't know up yours faster than me fact Shh overshot oh no yes no come on reloading wait wait for a reload okay fine okay okay No come on baby [Music] no come on that's what I'm saying there we go how hard that was actually I'd noticeably harder I still lost now what you guys are going head-to-head Oh to see who can headshot me first I didn't shoot there's one is quick Oh oh nice we kind of suck at the office oh boy there's one there's one [Music] so that's it five to four Cory but now they have to change places I don't think I played kind of sure I can like I'm certain at a time that's crazy I mean this whole thing's hard cuz monitor fresh great rains everything is that's what we're trying to do to you it's it's rough you guys ready yep yeah all right mm-hmm okay it's just better that was quick [Music] whoa tie game ladies and gentlemen Oh a nice right in the center jeez we'll get him eventually yeah I gotta lie I suck at this it's too to read be ready damn nice still side Oh Oh God we're terrible yeah actually oh boy you're embarrassing us nice so no pressure anything boys but next one wins well I'm gonna be as trixie as I can oh that's it did you feel like 240 Hertz made a difference in that challenge definitely does for sure yeah especially in like the middle one we pick up and you go down I think that matters in us do you feel for our smarter nope no did you already know everything that we saw today I so I want to say everything because I'm still under the impression that somebody on 60 Hertz could be just as good as somebody on 240 but now I'm starting to think that it might vary based on games I didn't expect my reaction time to be so bad because in reality my reaction speed might look good compared to I don't maybe like a casual player or something yeah but in comparison to these pros that I've seen their reaction time they're doing like 1.4 easy on average and I might like what one point six seven or something when you're scanning around a map do you think having a higher refresh rate monitor helps you identify a target more quickly that's where I'd say it helps you the most because when you're moving the faster you move the harder it is to see on sixty Hertz if you're I mean the reaction time is kind of a good way to put it I guess cause like when you're looking at a still image nothing's gonna change but once everything is moving around it's gonna get a lot harder so yeah absolutely do you think that compared to the gear you use your game sense and training your mind is more important less important or equally important I would say it's way more important that's like what you need to be a top-tier gamer hardware and an peripherals and stuff of course does matter but you gotta be good at game you know 144 and 248 does have a difference but the difference is not the huge oats a so you were the 60 Hertz King today not only did you nail more Dumbledore shots than shroud and quarry combined I think you also scored equally on your bomb sight defense between 60 and 144 I don't know like I mean like I mentioned before like 60 Hertz was you know pretty much like my main thing for a while and then finally moving on it like when I switched to 60 Hertz it all kind of felt familiar I like the delays and you know button timing and all that stuff so I was kind of able to just pick it up right away so and with 144 it's I mean pretty much I was like my main thing back at home so it for me it wasn't really too tough to transition going back into the past and then like back into the present Corey enshroud had a lot of mitigation strategies to compensate particularly between 144 and 240 their results were usually very close do you think that the lack of those strategies made it so that the hardware affected your ability to perform better I would say definitely just looking at the scaling of my testing and I wasn't I wasn't trying to do anything like that I was trying to be very straight forward from test to test so I wasn't trying to figure out the AI too much or anything like that but I so I think that maybe goes to show that the hardware is going to have more of an impact on a casual gamer versus somebody who's professional wear those little those little games you get from the hardware or gonna have less of effect because they're already playing at such a high level one really interesting takeaway based on shrouds much better performance at 60 Hertz with the r-tx 2060 super versus that ageing 750 was that even if you're still running a 60 Hertz monitor there is something to be gained from a graphics card upgrade and running it much higher FPS because there's just so much less delay even on your inputs okay so it's been about a week and we've had some time to dig into our data and our high-speed footage and see if using a high refresh rate monitor a powerful graphics card like a geforce r-tx 28 ET i can make you a better gamer it's worth going through test by test here while raw reaction times in our synthetic tests were similar across refresh rates when it came to reacting to moving objects and timing in our double doors test hit rates were way lower at 60fps 60 Hertz then at our higher refresh rates with most of our shots actually being just a few milliseconds off we also have a couple of shots here where they look like they could have been hits but ended up missing because at 60 frames per second the targets location doesn't update us often which meant that what our camera and therefore your eyes was seeing was already out of date by the time the shot landed mr. grim showed us that with enough practice you can actually overcome some of this disadvantage his experience with beat and rhythm games allowed him to quickly familiarize himself with the speed of the cue so that's the appearance of the opponent and then predict when they would cross his crosshair but everyone including brims performed better with frame rates over 60 fps showing that with more information to predict trajectory and speed everyone will perform better we actually had shroud repeat this test at 60 Hertz on his monitor but with a frame rate well above 200 and the result was much better because the input lag and overall latency is reduced but he still didn't land as many hits as when he had both high FPS and a high refresh rate display in the overwatch flick test at 60 frames and 60 Hertz we definitely saw differences in aim movement it was slower and with more corrective movement after the initial flick further more shots would often be taken a few milliseconds after the target disappeared the ghosting effect which occurs regardless of refresh rate is also greater at 60 Hertz and the displacement of the image between refreshes is larger making everything look blurrier at speed which necessitates slowing down onto our bomb site defense or flow state test at 60 frames and hertz movement is slower because the position of in-game aim is less clear the timing of the shots and movement prediction and tracking is worse and a movement between targets ends up being slower and less accurate because the subject has to readjust unsurprisingly shrouds runs in the bombsite defense flow state tests were the fastest though not actually the most consistent what was surprising was that his fastest runs were at a hundred and forty four frames and Hertz this appears to have been due to the training effect where he had started to recognize patterns in the test by the time he got to the 144 Hertz station with mr. Grimm's and Paul neither of whom have played much csgo we actually found that the last familiar you are with the activity the more the results line up with our expectations so their runs were both faster and more consistent as the refresh rate and frame rate increased we also found that I ended up being a great example of the training effect as well I did my 140 for a frame and Hertz test first then I did 60 then 240 and my run times ended up improving as I went so overall 60 FPS at 60 Hertz clearly had the worst results in every test while some individual runs did have better scores the consistency between runs was usually much better at 240 Hertz and the most predictable improvements were actually found in the more casual players who didn't have as much game sense and muscle memory to rely on so a min game then could be described as a function of muscle memory response prediction and confirmation when a target appears you begin to aim towards it based on your existing knowledge of where your mouse is and where it needs to be as you're moving you receive a visual and correct or continue your movement until you've reached your target when your target moves you predict where the target will be and when based on a combination of pre-existing knowledge of speed and your brain calculating the speed and trajectory based on what you see on the monitor so with lower frame and refresh rates the following disadvantages are present you've got less up to date target information due to frames being displayed for longer your movement is blurrier thanks to the transition of frames between refreshes and you've got a worse speed and trajectory estimation due to that lack of information these effects can be overcome to a great degree with training but there's going to be a limit to the situations where that training can be applied so I wasn't surprised to find out that 60 FPS gamers are at a significant disadvantage compared to high refresh rate gamers but I was surprised at how big the difference was between 144 and 240 so then all other things being equal will hide fps and a high refresh rate monitor make you a great gamer no but will it make you a better gamer undoubtedly so using a powerful graphics card like an Nvidia r-tx 20 ATT I thanks again to our sponsor for making this whole video happen to see things sooner and to have a better chance of hitting what you're aiming at does help and I can't wait to see how this translates to 300 FPS 300 Hertz and beyond is that a teaser for a part 3 I will let you be the judge you

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 8,183,252

Rating: 4.9418774 out of 5

Keywords: nvidia, gaming, high, fps, frame, gigabyte, aorus, acer, shroud, grimmmz, corey, paulshardware

Id: OX31kZbAXsA

Length: 36min 12sec (2172 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/D_Doggo]

Shroud looks different

[u/kazookat123]

It's definitely better than 15fps when walking through downtown Boston in fallout 4

[u/pingdown]

“Wait y’all are getting 240 FPS ?”

[u/lemon1112]

Regarding the double doors shot I have something to point out. Shroud isn't reacting slow, the reason why he isn't fast enough was that he stood in the middle of t base. He should be standing as to the right as possible and that will make the gap slightly wider, hence easier to hit your target.

[u/jahoney]

@11:52 he was shooting the guy in the backpack, it’s been a problem since release that fuckin backpack sticks out and does no damage.

Also I didn’t think anyone tried to hit the shot between the doors. I thought everyone goes for the wall bang, since it’s actually possible

[u/x0dogx]

Why da fuq does Corey look like a male Mia Khalifa?

[u/daemogorgon]

I don't like that they varied the FPS alongside the refresh rate of the monitor. This just brings in another variable, so concluding that just higher FPS or just higher refresh rate makes a significant difference is difficult. Imo they should have done two test runs: One in which just the refresh rate is varied, and another one for different frame rates.

[u/misconstrudel]

Do they mention when Shroud played at 60Hz without realising on lan?

[u/1337coinvb]

feedback on the video imho:

some of the testsetup i dont understand -

• if you want to compare the hz rate, why wouldnt you play the 60hz also with "identical high fps" as the other 2 setups ? - the lower fps creates an additional variable that skewes the results
• its a bit confusing to go from 60hz to 240hz to 140hz (at least in the video, should have been sequential low to high
• how did you avoid the "training effect" when going to higher hz ? (assuming people started out with 60hz and progressed, so this might skew also the endresults aswell, as ppl get more accustomed to the various challenges
• would have loved to see a % deviation in the stats (how many more % hits, not just raw numbers)

but great effort nonetheless