For gamers, high frame rates are important for a smooth visual display and good quality of experience (QoE). However, high frame rates alone are not enough as variations in the frame display times can degrade QoE even as the average frame rate remains high. While the impact of steady frame rates on player QoE is fairly well-studied, the effects of frame rate variation is not. This paper presents a 33-person user study that evaluates the impact of frame rate variation on users playing three different computer games. Analysis of the results shows average frame rate alone is a poor predictor of QoE, and frame rate variation has a significant impact on player QoE. While the standard deviation of frame times is promising as a general predictor for QoE, frame time standard deviation may not be accurate for all individual games. However, 95% frame rate floor - the bottom 5% of frame rates the player experiences - appears to be an effective predictor of both QoE overall and for the individual games tested.

Materials:

• Paper: pdf
• Slides: pptx
• Presentation video: mp4

See also:

• Mark Claypool and Kajal Claypool. Perspectives, Frame Rates and Resolutions: It's all in the Game, In Proceedings of the 4th ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG), Florida, USA, April 2009. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/perspective/

• Kajal Claypool and Mark Claypool. On Frame Rate and Player Performance in First Person Shooter Games, Springer Multimedia Systems Journal (MMSJ), Volume 13, Number 1, 2007. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/fr/

• Mark Claypool, Kajal Claypool, and Feissal Damaa. The Effects of Frame Rate and Resolution on Users Playing First Person Shooter Games, In Proceedings ACM/SPIE Multimedia Computing and Networking (MMCN) Conference, San Jose, California, USA, January 2006. Winner! Best paper award. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/fr-rez/