Gadgetory

so you got your expensive graphics card your overclocked octa-core CPU and more memory than a freaking elephant but when you're playing the latest triple-a games on your PC or really anything else for some reason things don't seem quite right especially when you're looking at a scene where a lot of things are moving around at once or the cameras panning because even with all that horsepower under the hood motion blur is a problem on even the most powerful rigs and if you're gaming on a VR headset like the oculus rift it can be even more distracting now to be clear we're not talking about the kind of motion blur that is intentionally added to a game in post-processing what we're talking about is unintentional motion blur caused by excessive pixel persistence you see an electronic display whether it's a computer monitor or a headset or a phone is made up of millions of individual pixels that change their brightness and color to create an image that you see so whenever the image on the screen changes which is merely constantly if you're playing a game that isn't pong the pixels cannot respond instantaneously with a typical LCD monitor there's actually delay of a few milliseconds before the pixels can actually change now while there are fast response monitors which have a delay or response time of just one or two milliseconds which helps to cut down on motion blur significantly even those don't completely solve the problem in fact even if a zero millisecond monitor existed there's still an issue with how LCD displays actually show images to us like other pieces of digital hardware an LCD display works by sampling image data it gets from the computer many times a second and displaying the samples as a series of still images these still images are then displayed at a rate equal to your screens refresh rate usually 60 Hertz and your brain interprets this as movement however your eye is not a piece of computer hardware unless of course your name is Adam Jensen human eyes are really good at perceiving differences in fluid motion and while high refresh rate displays that operate at a hundred and forty four Hertz or even haier looks great they still can't completely fool our brains just by showing us a series of static images and as if the problem of motion blur weren't bad enough on computer monitors it's much worse if you're using an oculus rift or VR headset like I mentioned before while motion blur might just be an annoyance if you're gaming in 2d on a desktop PC it can actually make you sick on a 3d display like the oculus rift because these headsets work by surrounding your field of vision in immersive 3d environments motion blur in these situations can make you feel physically out of balance with your surroundings and cause a very similar nausea to what you'd feel in a car or an airplane in the same situation so the solution itself is a pretty simple idea well let's just cut down on how long individual pixels are displayed so that we don't were not out of sync but how our display manufacturer is going to accomplish this well one way is through a technique called backlight strobing typically modern LCD monitors are illuminated by a backlight that's always on however in a display that uses backlight strobing the backlight instead switches on and off rapidly reducing the amount of time that you actually see each pixel this is very similar to the way that CRT displays which were you know for the kids that weren't alive at the time of the dinosaurs which are those old tube things that existed before LCDs came on to the market and is the reason that CRTs have historically been better at displaying scenes with fast motion at least to our eyes there are a number of monitors on the market that feature backlight strobing combined with high refresh rates to reduce motion blur as much as possible while still maintaining the picture quality and low energy consumption not to mention the space savings of a flat panel LCD of course it's also possible to ditch the backlight altogether and go a different route so the consumer version of the oculus rift features a display based on organic LEDs or olitz öhlins can generate their own light through the use of specialized organic compounds but more importantly for gamers Oh have a very quick response time much faster than the pixels in a conventional LCD and not only does this cut down on motion blur on its own the low response times allow all EDS to interpolate frames easily meaning that your system KS missing frames in a given second to match your displays frame rate or if you're just watching a movie recorded at the usual 24 fps and you want your experience to be less cinematic I guess it could do that too so whether you're gaming in 3d using a headset or just a monitor with 3d glasses these technologies will help you do your thing without feeling like you're on some kind of vomit inducing carnival ride speaking of vomit inducing carnival rides our sponsor today is fractal design and boy do we have a treat for you instead of telling you guys about their you know Scandinavian design cases and power supplies and cooling products we're having Luke Russert stupid look we had this conversation already I told you I have to host this because you just can't do a good enough job of it so I'm super done I'm sick this is ridiculous I've been trying to build this company for like two years we don't have to roll the camera on this like okay look if you need to talk about this and you need to talk to yourself about how you run the company no air conditioning people are like overheating all the time I'm working well I'm sick I've just get my doctor's appointment cuz I have to tape you up look I think what even is that like I've been sick for like two months I finally get a doctor's point with my family doctor yeah you don't you make me not go because of masking tape I think you're I think look okay but we were supposed to have you to the spot and you were supposed to do Josh's thing I get dragged into the office and I have to film this it's not like I wanted to like okay you know what just I'm done we'll talk later no I'm just done you um so sorry I hope that wasn't too awkward guys like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you have suggestions for future fast as possible is that I guess won't be hosted by Luke and as always don't forget to subscribe