There's got to be something else going on there.

280 frames/sec is about 3.5 ms/frame. Signals don't even leave the retina that fast, let alone propagate to brain areas linked to perception and action.

Perhaps the higher frame rate makes the motion smoother, which allows the pilot to estimate and extrapolate an objects' motion more accurately, or something like that.

The visual system do not work in frames (well, on a fundamental level I supose it does, with the indivitual photons and nerve impulses being the smallest unit, but that is not a limit in practice). The information the retina captures is streamed continuesly to the brain, so higher FPS provides a higher temporal resolution for the visual experience.

I don't think a fighter pilot inheriently react faster because of the resolution, but he is trained to detect motion in his peripheral vision. Perhaps he notice the smooth motion more than people who rarely train that part of their visual system. It would be interested to see how a trained and experience hunter would compare, as they often use peripheral vision as well.

My point was that 3.5ms frames are close to that limit.

The nervous system is pretty slow. Each action potential takes about a millisecond, and is followed a refractory period of another 1-2 milliseconds or so. This limits the speed of transmission in the nervous system generally.

The visual system, specifically, is even slower. There's a fairly complicated electrochemical cascade that turns photons into electrical impulses in rods and cones, and it's not fast. Drum (1982) describes several attempts at measuring the latencies of cones. The exact value depends on several factors like adaption levels and the visual stimuli, but they're all in the tens of milliseconds.

I have no doubt there is a latency, but I was trying to say that the stream of information is not discrete. The stream is continues, so higher framerate means that more information will flow to the brain because the temporal resolution is higher.

Are you saying that the rods and cones only "sample" every so often?

No, in that there is not a master clock, shutter, or anything like that that separates the visual input into discrete frames.

Yes, in that phototransduction is a sluggish chemical process. The impulse-response functions of photoreceptors are pretty well-known (e.g, Figure 1 here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1189952/?page=5). The tiny square wave at the bottom is the visual stimulation; the other traces are the responses of individual photoreceptors.

Figure 4 of the paper (p. 689) shows the response to a pair of flashes. In the bottom-most trace, you can see that the photoreceptor "misses" the second visual stimulus because the responses evoked by the first and second stimuli overlap in time and interfere.

I'd say that the visual system does get a continuous stream of inputs, but its output is low-pass filtered (and clipped, rectified, etc) so that faster inputs are not always reflected in its output.

That is interesting. When the stimuli is long enough, you get full resolution, but since the receptors are not syncronized I would expect the eye to react to framerates faster than the response time of the receptors, at the cost of resolution.

It is indeed an interesting topic, thanks for the pointers.

Smooth motion is definitely a big factor. Just look at things in terms of how fast something on screen (eg. the cursor) is moving in terms of pixels per frame.

Moving a cursor horizontally across a 4k display in a relatively slow one second is 64 pixels per frame at 60Hz, which is significantly wider than the cursor itself. At 144Hz it's about 26 pixels per frame, and at 280Hz it would be about 14 pixels per frame.

Even if you have a low-persistence display, you need to have a pretty high refresh rate to draw smooth motion. Hardly anything needs to be animated all the way down at 1 pixel per frame, but hardly anything currently comes at all close to that ideal strobe-free smoothness.

Actually, human eyes don't have a "frame rate" per se, or if you want there are different frame rates depending on the feature - and how far removed it is from the retina. Essentially, the retina itself can detect >300hz, then there's a bunch of processing as you go back the optic nerve that causes that number to drop for higher-level features.

Any chance you have a source for that?

I'm legitimately curious, since I've never heard anything like that.

In my hardcore gaming days using a fantastic Hitachi CRT monitor I did some basic experiments with refresh rates.

My subjective results were somewhere in between the values you have as an example. I stopped noticing significant difference somewhere north of 160Hz, and at 200Hz they were barely perceptible.

Very interesting to hear that someone has actually been measuring this in a more controlled way than I did some 18 years ago.

It's also quite interesting how reluctant people are to even acknowledge the existence of something they themselves haven't noticed. Almost everyone refuted my eye witness account simply because they had read/heard that they eye can only notice <some number between 20-60> frames per secobd, and thus I couldn't possibly see any difference in motion above that threshold.

How do you test that; can you measure how you react to motion at 120fps vs 280fps, or is it just a feeling?

It's not a feeling, we do the measures. It's like measuring your reaction time, few experiments are on screen and some are analogs. At the end you have a measure in a unit of time, and you deduce the fps from that

In FPS there are people called "stat junkies" the name expresses its hobby well. You try to play for the best stats. Head shot ratio (how often you get head shots), KDR (kill death ratio).

You could likely data mine from stat sites before before/after purchasing very high refresh rate monitors.

OFC there maybe some bias to try harder once you drop >$400 on a hobby. In my own subjective experience 60 -> 144FPS was night and day. Roughtly ended up being a 50% pref improvement.