Could blank frame insertion be made to work better?

kasakka

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Most new high refresh rate displays nowadays don't have support for ULMB or similar backlight strobing tech. I have found it useful on my ASUS PG278Q when playing games that run at constant high framerates, there is noticeably less motion blur.

Could this be achieved with better blank frame insertion techniques in software? The blank frames lower brightness so that would have to be compensated. Likewise processing time has been an issue on TVs that have supported this feature but we haven't seen something like this done on GPUs have we? You'd think that GPUs would be capable of doing this fast enough while also supporting G-Sync. I know ELMB is out there but it seems to have its own set of problems.

Motion blur will be an issue until we have monitors that are 3x the current refresh rates and panel response times are down to OLED levels regardless of tech.
 
If you did it on the GPU output side, you'd be tossing away half your FPS. That's why it is done on the display side, the monitor effectively doubles the signal by turning off the back-backlight in-between each frame. If you did it on the GPU side, your 144 Hz monitor would only appear to be running at 72 Hz.
 
If you did it on the GPU output side, you'd be tossing away half your FPS. That's why it is done on the display side, the monitor effectively doubles the signal by turning off the back-backlight in-between each frame. If you did it on the GPU side, your 144 Hz monitor would only appear to be running at 72 Hz.

I see, did not consider that.
 
This technique seems like such a no brainer for OLED monitors. Wouldn't it mitigate burn in at the same time as reducing persistence?
 
This technique seems like such a no brainer for OLED monitors. Wouldn't it mitigate burn in at the same time as reducing persistence?

Depends on whether burn-in is more sensitive to duration or luminance.

At the refresh rates we're talking about, the frame durations are small enough that we temporally integrate luminance information (bloch's law). So a 1 ms presentation of a patch of light that has a luminance of 100 cd/m^2 will be perceptually the same as a 2 ms presentation at 50 cd/m^2.

Because of this, when we reduce the visible duration of a frame (e.g. by strobing), we need to increase the luminance of the frame to compensate for the reduced duration. This increased luminance may counteract the benefit of lower persistence as far as burn in is concerned.

Also, last time I looked into this, OLEDs struggle with low persistence precisely because they aren't bright enough to compensate for low persistence. Not sure if things have changed recently though.
 
120 Hz 4K was pulled at the last minute on the LG 2019 OLED's so that they could use the back-plane bandwidth elsewhere. Supposedly it looked pretty bad ass of course. But yes, there is a decrease in luminosity.
 
A moving black band that runs at a high multiple of the frame rate would be the most effective blur reducing tool as it would “wipe” the frame perceptually and have minimal brightness modulation issues. Some displays do use techniques like that.
 
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